#211 Stuart Hameroff: Why AI Will Never Fully Replicate Human Consciousness

32:50We went to his office, the Mathematical Institute. And he said that he was going to a conference on consciousness at Cambridge coming up with Pat Churchland and Dan Dennett, two materialist reductionist philosophers. And I said, oh, that sounds fun. I'd like to go, but I have to go to this other conference. I'd like to give a talk. So anyway, he said, well, tell me about microtubules. So I did most of the talking. I just started talking. And he was really taken by the Fibonacci. That was Fibonacci geometry. He asked a lot of questions. First question was, these things are real. They're not like simulations of something.

33:30I said, no, no, no. They're found in every cell. They're very important.

33:37So, like I said, I did most of the talking. And at the end, he said, well, thank you very much. That was really, really interesting. And, you know, I gave him some papers and I showed him a book I had written on Microtrievilles and shook his hand and said goodbye. And I walked away and I said, wow, that was cool. I got to meet Roger Penrose. He's a really, really interesting guy. So I went to my meeting. I think it was where it was in Brighton or someplace. And two weeks later, I was back in London and I was having dinner with a friend. he said hey i went to this meeting in cambridge and roger penrose was talking about you and your stupid microtubules and that was a thrill i gotta admit that was a real thrill and uh soon afterwards uh i got a uh i got an invitation to a meeting in sweden uh no audience just just scientists including roger dan dan and a few others north of the arctic circle in an isolated research station So I said, absolutely.

34:30So I went and I met Roger and his wife and we spent four or five days up there playing a lot of ping pong, hiking at midnight, skiing. We went skiing at midnight and and just started talking about microtubules and quantum and how we could develop a model. And then we met a few, about a month later for two weeks in Denmark where I had spent my sabbatical. And he and his wife always went there to go to their dentist, spent two weeks a year there. So we spent some time there together. In fact, I was with him at lunch there when he had somebody come up and said, Roger, you just became a knight.

35:16And at first I heard of that. I mean, he said, oh, yeah. I said, wow, are you going to get to meet the queen? He says, well, I've met her several times. She's very nice. He's very nonplussed about things. Sure. He didn't want to fuss about it. He was kind of embarrassed. Same thing when he won his Nobel Prize years later. But anyway, so we started coming up with a theory of how we could quantify based on the simple equation. collapse occurs at time t equals h bar over e sub g where we could calculate e sub g for for tubulants and figure out how many tubulants we needed in superposition to reach collapse for a conscious moment at certain frequencies.

35:54So Vanessa, his wife said, you know, I encourage you to work with him, but I just have to warn you, he's very meticulous. He's very slow. He's doing 20 things at once. This will take a long, long, long time. So be patient. I said, thank you. That is good to know because I'm easily frustrated about things like that. But, you know, it's such a thrill to work with Roger. So anyway, three or four months later, we still don't have a manuscript, a rough draft. We just have some general concepts and how to quantify this and that. They're making progress, but nothing close to a manuscript. And we got a letter from our email, I guess, from the publisher of the Journal of Consciousness Studies who said that Pat Churchland, an undergraduate student, had written a pre-entered strike against our theory before we even published on it.

36:44And if we could write a response in the next issue, but they needed a manuscript in two weeks. And I'm thinking, holy crap, it's been a year we don't have a manuscript. How are we going to come up with a... So I talked to Roger about it, and he was sufficiently annoyed by it, as well he should be, that we, so basically there were two parts of their attack. Number one was on Gödel's theorem and whether that was applicable and Hillary Putnam and all these arguments back and forth that I didn't understand. I didn't have a freaking clue. The second part was about microtubules. And the main argument they had was that there's a drug called colchicine, which is used for gout.

37:28So in gout, you get uric acid crystals in your joints, quite often the large toe, but it can be any joint. And the immune cells, the lymphocytes and macrophages, move into the joints and then release all these bradykinins, which cause this inflammation, swelling, in enclosed space, and it hurts like hell. so um uh the colchicine so the the lymphocytes move by the microtubules assembling in a certain direction then flowing and then going this way that way so that's how they move so colchicine prevents microtubules that are assembled from disassembling and then reassembling so it it does inhibit the this movement of these lymphocytes and macrophages therefore it treats scout.

38:17It's pretty, it's good. It's good for it. Uh, and they said, but people who take co-hosting don't lose consciousness. So consciousness cannot depend on microtubules. So I said, Roger, I got this one. So I said, uh, number one, co-hosting only affects microtubules that are actively disassembling and reassembling. Uh, the microtubules in, in brain cells, neurons, uh, don't have to do that because they don't have to do nerve cells don't divide. So they don't have to disassemble for mitosis and then reassemble, in which case you'd lose any information you had stored in the lattice. Um, and, and, uh, and they affect, uh, lymphocytes because they need to, to do that to move.

39:02But again, you can screw up the lattice, but it doesn't cost you anything because you're not, you're not storing any memory there in dendrites and soma neurons uh the microtubules are capped at both ends so you can't add at one end and lose to the other which is called treadmilling the neurons don't divide so they don't disassemble so they can re reform as mitotic spindles they just kind of get hardwired and they're perfect for storing memory actually and uh in fact that's that's where i think memory is stored um so uh uh i said okay so the colchicine number one it doesn't cross the blood-brain barrier so it couldn't affect brain microtubules anyway number two it only affects microtubules that are disassembling and reassembling so even if it got there it wouldn't do anything to them and number three i found a paper where somebody for some reason had injected colchicine into the brain of rats and wiped them out they were like brain dead and so that was my part a few other things and uh and uh and so we published uh two and that was our first paper and the title of their paper and i I don't know if you know Pat Churchland.

40:06She's still around. She's very old. Really caustic, annoying, sarcastic. And she's in the and in the beginning of their paper. Well, first of all, they call, you know, Roger's famous for Penrose tilings, you know, tiling a plane with self-repeating patterns that don't repeat and that sort of thing. And so the title of their paper was Gaps in Penrose's Toilings, has a pun on Penrose's tilings. Right. So there was a gap in his toilings, unconsciousness, and blah, blah, blah. And in like the first or second sentence, they said, this theory is no better supported than one in a gazillion caterpillar with hookah hypotheses.

40:56seized. So that was their opening line, you know, welcome, welcome to consciousness. We're going to fuck you up big time. And, and so they, they started off with saying we were from Alice in Wonderland and, and, and, you know, whatever that implied. So at, at the end of our paper, we answered all the points at the end. We, we, I said, Roger, we have to say something about the stupid Alice in Wonderland thing. And I said, how about we say, it's not that we're in Wonderland, And perhaps their heads are in the sand like ostriches. Yeah. And I just said, oh, yeah, that's fine. But let's make it Shakespearean praps, like P-P-P-S-V-E-R-A-P-S.

41:35I said, fine. So that's what it was. So then we sent it in. And then Roger and I, we were at a meeting at the Fetzer Institute, actually. And we get a fax from the publisher about to go to press. And he says, I commissioned the cartoonist to draw a picture of this dispute between you guys and Pat and Grush. And I want to use it, but I want your permission to use it. I said, OK. I said, well, Roger and I together faxed it to us. And it's a picture of. So I told you the caterpillar with hookah story. So it's a picture of. In the middle are two giant ostriches with their heads buried in the sand and their butts pointing out the camera.

42:18The viewer saying G for Grush and C for Churchland. and uh on the to there on the left is a big mushroom with a caterpillar sitting on top of it smoking a hookah and the caterpillar looked suspiciously like me in fact it looked exactly like me and i was blowing the hookah smoke up the butts of the two ostriches and then on the other side, Roger was dressed as the white rabbit holding the keys to the platonic realm behind him. That was the cartoon. I said, that's fine with me. I don't know if Roger will go for that. Roger looked at it and he chugled. He said, okay, fine. That got published. I could probably dig it out.

43:04It's really funny. Yeah, I'd love to see it. Before you go on,

43:14where do you want to go from from here do you want to explain how you guys think consciousness arises from these quantum effects in the microtubules or i'm interested in in the nature of consciousness and and anesthesiology like yeah so i'll let you go from there okay well let me let me give you a little more background and I'll get to that. Because I told you we were relying on this theoretical frolicoherence. But then in about 2010, this guy, an Indian guy, who becomes a key figure in this whole story. His name is Anurban Bandhapadhyay. And he was a grad student or a postdoc in India, and he won this international prize from the National Institute of Material Sciences in Skuba, Japan, the number one Japanese material sciences student, top three in the world, to have his own lab.

44:20So he didn't have to apply for funding, no postdoc, just here's the lab, here's money, do what you're going to do. And they gave three of them per year. So the first thing he did was build a molecular computer out of something that was published in Nature or something. And then somewhere along the line, he got, he read about me and Roger and microtubules, got interested in microtubules. And he started studying them and doing nanotechnology. And to make a long story short, he found that microtubules have coherent oscillations that repeat every three orders of magnitude, going down in frequency from kilohertz to megahertz, sorry, going up in frequency down in scale, kilohertz, megahertz, gigahertz, terahertz in microtubules.

45:05And at each level, they have a coherent resonance pattern that's exactly the same, a triplet of triplets. And so he did this in three scales. He started with like for one microtubule, he attached 10 nanoprobes and used a couple of them to stimulate. And if you stimulate a microtubule with a voltage, It's an insulator. But if you stimulate it and alternate the voltage or use AC, you'll find certain frequencies where there's a huge conductivity. And then it goes along and then three orders of magnitude later, you see the same huge conductivity. So every three orders of magnitude, you see this resonance conductivity with a particular pattern that is a triplet of triplets.

45:54You see three peaks, then each peak has three peaks. And he found that in kilohertz, megahertz, gigahertz and terahertz, and arguably you could say the EEG in hertz is a triplet of triplets or something like that. And so that was evidence, number one, for the coherent vibrations we needed for just automata function. But some of these frequencies were in the quantum realm, so it got us into the quantum realm. It got around the problem of the brains to warm, wet, and noisy for quantum effects. And but Anurban, you know, he had this further theory that this actually went further down into the fine scale structure of the universe, that these triplet of triplets continued in space time geometry all the way down to the Planck scale.

46:41And this is very similar to to Roger's idea that somehow these quantum processes were were reaching the Planck scale or were rooted in the Planck scale. So Anurban had this model and I've come to adopt it, actually, that you have these triplets going down. And once you get faster than terahertz or petahertz, you're beyond, you're smaller than biology and it can continue somehow in space-time geometry, which other people have said had fractal properties as well. So, Anurban calls it a great chain, a great resonance chain or a scale and variant hierarchy. And but I think in the brain, at least this go this go if you go inside neurons, you see this hierarchy going smaller, deeper, faster into more into the quantum realm.

47:31Now, a lot of people have had hierarchical models in the brain, starting from the level of neurons as the fundamental units going up. So you have neurons, networks of neurons, networks of networks of neurons getting larger and slower. and a lot of people have these kinds of hierarchies. But if you go the other way, into the neuron, into the microtubules, you get smaller, faster, deeper, and quantum stuff. And Anurban calls the microtubule behavior time crystals. So a time crystal was described by Frank Wilczek, who won a Nobel Prize for one of the nuclear forces, I forget. And he came up with the idea of a time crystal, which is actually a kind of a perpetual motion machine, but because the ground, the ground state of it is an oscillator, but that can happen because, you know, depending on what the ground state is, I mean, there's energy at the universe, there's energy at the Planck scale, there's energy in biology at KT.

48:29So, but the point of a time crystal is that, so in a, in a, in a spatial crystal, the spatial pattern repeats wherever you look in the crystal. in a time crystal the frequency the same pattern appears at different frequencies so in a microtubule had the exact same frequency resonance frequency pattern in kilohertz megahertz gigahertz and terahertz and probably petahertz and uh that might go all the way down we've actually uh in in our astrobiology work we found suggestion of same sort of thing in molecules from uh from a meteorite uh these are polyorganic molecules We're looking for the origin of life and consciousness.

49:10I retired from anesthesia and I'm working in astrobiology now with a guy named Dante Loretta who brought back these samples from the asteroid Bennu. They just got back last September. So we're going to be looking at these organic molecules. So this time crystal behavior might be a kind of a sign of life or maybe even consciousness. We think that actually consciousness was there at the beginning and prompted the origin of life. Because otherwise, there's really no reason for all that purposeful behavior before genes and brains. So we think consciousness is there right from the start. And with Rogers mechanism, it could be.

49:43But that's kind of a summative digression, but I think a very important one. But going back to where we are now, so rather than a cartoon neuron of a neuron you define or not, we have this multiscale hierarchy. And you could say, well, this is reductionist because you're going into one neuron. But when you get into the quantum, these microtubules in that neuron are entangled with the ones in the next door and next door and next door. So you can have big parts of the brain entangled into one fundamental quantum unit, which is what you need for conscious, for binding, for example, for unity of conscious self.

50:21So, you know, the orca wire events that happen are specific events, but they're entangled. And so they're brain wide and they happen at a particular frequency. And they're actually too fast for cognition because to avoid decoherence, we think they happen like 10 megahertz. But then they interfere and you give slower and slower waves, eventually getting down to EEG range and cognitive epics and that sort of thing. So it's a multiscale hierarchy based on microtubule time crystals that goes inside each neuron eventually to the Planck scale. But those microtubules in that neuron are entangled with others.

51:02So it's actually, you have a global effect throughout wide parts of the brain through entanglement. Can I ask a question? So the entanglement is not through a biological mechanism. It's a quantum effect, right? I would call it a quantum biological effect. I think actually entanglement is probably important in biology. But yeah, it's a quantum effect, but I'm saying it's happening in biology. Yeah. No, the reason I say that is, you know, the split brain experiments from the 60s, you know, where they cut the corpus callosum. Yeah. And you end up with two separate consciousnesses or at least two separate hemispheres that function, appear to be conscious.

52:03how would this theory work with that experiment? Well, first of all, it's unclear whether they actually really severed the two sides because there's a connection anterior, the anterior cingulate cortex, they never connected. So it's unclear whether they're actually truly separated. But I don't see it as a problem. I mean, if you did separate it, then you'd have two brains and presumably you'd block the entanglement between the two. So you wouldn't have binding. So I don't see that as a problem for our thing. Yeah. And can you talk about consciousness, as I said, from the point of view of anesthesia and how that's different from sleep?

52:53Right. Well, sleep, you know, if you poke somebody when they're sleeping or take a knife to them, they're going to wake up. if you take a night for somebody who's anesthetized, they're not going to wake up. So it's different. Now, how is it different? Sleep is more hormonal, but it's not the same. The question is, how does anesthesia work? Because anesthesia is selective. Anesthesia takes away consciousness, but spares non-conscious brain activities. So, for example, when we do or did spinal surgeries, so let's say they're operating on a spinal cord and the patient's face down and the back is filleted open.

53:39And you want to know whether the surgeon is cutting out blood supply or otherwise screwing with the spinal cord and the patient would wake up paralyzed. Obviously, we want to avoid that. So what they do is we do neurophysiology and we have these guys come in and they put electrodes on the brain and electrodes on the foot or on the hand and do both motor and sensory evoked potentials. So sensory means you send a stimulus here, the pinky or the hand, and you record it in the other side of the brain. And as long as the spinal cord's working, you're getting those signals. So these guys are watching these signals and they say, oh, you just pulled too much, lighten up, and then the signal comes back.

54:27So these signals are processing, sensory signals are processing even though the patient is unconscious and doesn't perceive them. And similarly, motor, you can stimulate the motor and cause the hand to move over here so the signals are going the other way. So you can look at motors. So the brain is actively processing signals without consciousness. So what goes away with anesthesia is a good question and probably the key to understanding consciousness. So anesthetic gases, there's also propofol and some other drugs, but we'll come to those in a second. But the gases were discovered in the 19th century.

55:08uh initially as uh initially they were used for social purposes for recreation like ether frolics if you sniff a little ether you get high as a kite you dance around like an idiot and nitrous oxide laughing gas people still abuse nitrous oxide and virtually i think any of the anesthetics if you just take a small amount you get you get high from it and propofol makes you high you know Michael Jackson, for example, we get about 10 ,000 times too much, but in low doses, it's tremendously euphoric. So all the gases at low concentrations were euphoric, but at higher concentrations made you unconscious.

55:48And they realized that and they started using it for surgery. And then later we realized that it's selective, that the evoked potentials and other activities, the EEG is slow, but it doesn't go away. You still have some EEG. So it affects something. It affects consciousness, but almost little else. Then the paradox is that the gases bind very non-discriminately, non-specifically by quantum forces, quantum interactions, Van der Waals forces. very, very weak quantum interactions. They don't form chemical bonds. So they just have, so if you have like an aromatic ring, like a benzene or a halogen, full electron clouds, the electrons here are going to repel the electrons here.

56:37And these electrons are going to repel these and they start to oscillate or they couple. And that's how oscillations work in the microtubules. And the anesthetic comes in, they bind, but they don't oscillate because it turns out the polarizability is different. So they don't oscillate and they dampen the quantum oscillations. So the only thing they're doing is dampening quantum oscillations and not forming any chemical bonds. But you have them all over the body in huge amounts and fat stores. I always used to tell the residents, there's more anesthetic than the guy's ass than in his brain, but it's probably working in his brain don't you think as a mechanism to point out that there's there's a lot of anesthesia in the membrane but that doesn't mean it's working in the membrane it's actually working the microtubules which i thought but the binding was uh but everybody else said no no it's working on membrane receptors uh so eventually it was figuring out that anesthetics despite being a lipid side of it actually work on proteins inside the proteins where the aromatic rings are.

57:41And then a question of which protein. So from the mid-80s, and I've been in this field my whole career, so I know this very well. In the mid-80s, it was realized that, okay, they act on proteins directly. You don't have to go through the lipid to get to the protein. They work directly on the proteins in the nonpolar interior. And then the question was, which proteins? Everybody thought, well, it must be membrane proteins. And they bind the most to GABA receptors. So everybody's, it must be the GABA receptors which are inhibitory, they must potentiate the GABA receptors. Well, the problem is that not all anesthetics bind to GABA receptors.

58:20And the Meyer-Overton core, so back in the, I skipped this part, back around the turn of the 20th century, Meyer and Overton had a bunch of anesthetic gases that had different potencies, but the same potency for every animal. This is actually pretty amazing. uh and all the anesthetics work on all animals and plants and uh and uh for for one gas let's say halothane its potency is going to be the same for you and i or for a flea or for an insect or for an elephant at equilibrium so if you allow equilibrium it takes the same amount to put you or i or an elephant or a flea to sleep pretty amazing but that potency would be different from something else.

59:05So that tells me that consciousness is the same in all animals. The mechanism is basically the same and the target has to be the same. And so this became the unitary mechanism. So they thought it was in GABA receptors, but not all anesthetics bind to GABA. And some anesthetics make it open, some close. There was no consistent picture. So finally, in 2008, after 24 years of studying everyday membrane protein, The leaders in the anesthesia mechanism field led by a guy named Ted Eager, who was undoubtedly the leader, and they finally gave up. They wrote a paper in a Maine anesthesia journal, is a new paradigm needed to understand anesthetics?

59:52And they said no one membrane protein or no combination of membrane proteins can account for anesthetic action. And he said, we need a new paradigm. Well, I wrote and I said, hell yeah, we do. It's microtubules. But they ignored that. They went back to lipids and wasted another 15, 20 years. Beginning in 2006, a couple of things happened. Number one, people began to find quantum effects in biology, photosynthesis, for example. Photosynthesis used warm temperature quantum biology. But also in the anesthesia world, a lab at Penn, Rod Eckenhoff, began doing systematic. So once they kind of threw out the idea that GABA was the answer, Eckenhoff's group did a systematic search of all proteins.

1:00:45And, for example, they used radio-labeled halothane in a mouse brain and then took the brain and ground it up and did gel electrophoresis and found that 70 different proteins in the mouse brain neuron bound halothane, 70, half in the membrane and half in the cytoplasm. And then they did genomic and proteomic work to find out which protein was functionally involved. And they narrowed it down to the only one that was anywhere involved in signaling was tubulin. And then they did other studies with different anesthetics that showed genomic and proteomic effects from isoflurin and sevoflurin. So there seemed to be genomic.

1:01:30And then they did an optogenetics experiment where they had an anesthetic, an anthracene derivative that was only anesthetic when it was fluorescent. And they gave it to tadpoles who have conveniently transparent heads. And so the tadpoles, they gave them this anthocene anesthetic, which would be anesthetic when it fluoresced. And they were able to swim around and look pretty normal. And they would turn on the UV light, and the tadpoles would go belly up. They'd be anesthetized. And when they ground up their brains, they found that the anthocene was bound to microtubules. And so that's optogenetic.

1:02:10So genomic, proteomic, optogenetic. And then they did a study, they did a retrospective study on clinical patients. So there's a drug called Taxol, which binds to microtubules and stabilizes microtubules. And it's used for cancer because the microtubules can't disassemble and become mitotic spindles. So it inhibits mitosis, more so for the tumor cells than for normal cells. So it's an effective anti-cancer drug. So, uh, uh, but it stabilized, some of it gets into the blood, uh, gets past the blood-brain barrier. Uh, and when these, so they did a retrospective study on patients who, uh, on Taxol came to surgery and looked at their requirements of anesthetic requirements compared to non-Taxol users.

1:02:55And they were significantly higher. So the people on Taxol, which stabilized microtubules and bound to microtubules, needed more anesthetic than did anybody else. and they concluded that anesthetics must destabilize microtubules or the textile is just blocking access to the site and suggested that anesthesia works on microtubules. So I reviewed it for anesthesiology. I said, this is a great paper, but they didn't take it. I was probably too excited about it. So they published it somewhere else, but they did publish it. And then recently I, I reviewed a paper that's going to be coming out pretty soon on a, uh, where somebody did a similar thing, but in mice with a different microtubule stabilizer called apophilone.

1:03:46Actually, I shouldn't really talk about this cause it's, well, it's, it's accepted in press. It'll take a while for this to come out. So, okay. This should come out soon. So, so basically, uh, they gave it to the, to mice or to half of the mice and then did a writing And then they put them in a chamber with isoflurin, I think, at 4%, and just waited until they fell over. And that's called a loss of writing reflex. And there was something like four minutes on an average. But the mice on epithelome record five minutes, over five minutes, so like a minute longer, pretty long time. And so the paper, I reviewed the paper.

1:04:30I thought, this is a great paper. But one of my colleagues, and I know who he was, who was a cartoon neuron proponent, just absolutely ripped it. He just was quibbling over the weakest shit and coming up with, no, we can't pull it. I'm going to bullshit. This is a fantastic paper. This is really important. Anyway, I won that argument, and the paper's coming out. And I'll try to remember to send it to you when it comes out. It should come out within a couple of weeks, I think. Yeah. Yeah. A couple of things. Just as a little aside, you mentioned plants when you were talking about the effect of anesthesia on microtubules or on consciousness.

1:05:11What are you talking about there? Wow. So plants have microtubules and a friend of mine named Rajneesh Khanna, who is at the Carnegie Institute of Plant Science at Stanford, did a study where with the well, two things. I mentioned, I'll come back to that. I mentioned my friend Anurban discovering the kilohertz, megahertz, gigahertz, terahertz. It turns out you can measure that from the scalp in humans with a single electrode. You can measure megahertz pretty simply. And you can also, well, Anurban's doing studies in India now with a full DDG, measuring all 12 orders of frequency at various parts of the brain, collecting a huge amount of data that I'm not allowed to talk about yet, but it looks pretty damn promising from our standpoint that there's a change in the megahertz.

1:06:17But you can take a single probe and just measure it, and we messed around with that, and you can see the triplet in megahertz. Anyway, we were doing these experiments. And so we said, let's try it on a dog. So we tried on a dog, and we got a nice signal. We tried it on all of us. We got a nice signal. We tried it on an apple and got no signal. And then we tried it on a plant. And I remember Rajneesh had told me that the microtubules are most active at the junction where the root meets the stalk or stem. And so we were looking around. didn't i said try it down by the stem my way this root meets the stem and there we saw it we saw a triplet so he did so he's that's where the the microtubules control uh for example the turning of the sunflower to follow the sun right well he did an experiment uh where he showed that anise where he put a little isoflurane down in this area by the stem roots it blocked the turning of the of the sunflower.

1:07:23So, uh, there's that. And so plants put out megahertz and, uh, anesthesia seems to block them. Okay. The other thing you, you sort of, uh, made a comment, uh, uh, dismissed, not dismissively, but, uh, that, uh, that, oh my God, I'm a reductionist. When, when you were, what, isn't this theory of quantum coherence? Anti-reductionist, because I'm going smaller and smaller. Yes, except when you get to quantum, everything's connected to everything. That's the key. If you didn't have quantum entanglement among all those tubulants, you just have a lot of really smart neurons, but you wouldn't have a smart brain.

1:08:12But if they're entangled and they're acting collectively together, and actually we need 10 to the 15th entangled tubulants, in the brain to have a collapse at 10 megahertz. And you could say, well, is that even possible? And the only evidence for biological entanglement, which I'm aware was done by Anurban between microtubules or between parameters and microtubules. And what he did was he had a bunch of microtubules and he radiated them and then he separated them. And he had a way of measuring angular momentum in a microtubule. And he found that the angular momentum, when they were separate, the angular momentum of this one was entangled with the angular momentum of this one.

1:08:56My fingers are moving the right way. Yeah. So there is entanglement. And now he's doing more and looking at eight different parameters. So in what we call the quantum underground, where these nonpolar rings are deep inside proteins, I think you can have entanglement. It's a quantum, very quantum friendly, quantum wonderland. Yeah. And they're deep inside. Right. But why is that anti-materialist? I mean, it's still a physical effect. It's a quantum effect, not a Newtonian effect, but it's still physical. Yeah. Well, usually materialism means classical, strictly classical. And some people say physical meaning material.

1:09:42but uh physics can physical can also be quantum physics so it's it's a particular it's quantum physics is interpreted by roger which uh in which collapse occurs through this uh general uh quantum gravity or general relativity space-time thing which connects us to space-time geometry and that's a key thing because it makes consciousness uh somewhat fundamental and you know all the you know the deepak chopras of the world and and and they all say consciously and a lot of other people A lot of physicists now seriously say that consciousness is fundamental and somehow, you know, in tune or attached to the universe.

1:10:19And Roger started all that, although he doesn't like to talk about that. He doesn't like to talk about anything that would sound woo-woo, even though other people might take it that way. And quite frankly, I'm kind of sick of the cartoon neuron people criticizing because I think what they're saying is the woo-woo, you know, that cartoon neurons could give rise to consciousness, I think is crucial. Yeah, it's just when you, you know, a lot of people at a level much shallower than what you guys are operating at, think of materialism, dualism, and dualism as pointing to a non-physical realm. and that then bleeds into spirituality and religion and all of that, the existence of a soul.

1:11:12And so that's what I was saying. why isn't this reductionist in that the consciousness is a quantum effect or emerging from a quantum effect, not from some other non-physical realm? Well, I'm not sure it isn't. I mean, what do you mean by some other non-physical realm? Uh, if you have space-time geometry, that is somewhat holographic and repeats different scales. And, uh, if consciousness is a vibration in our process and space-time geometry that can, uh, in fact, go to faster frequencies than can be accommodated biology. Uh, I hate to say it, but, you know, uh, consciousness out of the body is not impossible.

1:12:07You know, until somebody proves that consciousness is a classical computation or classical effect within the brain, we can't rule it out outside of the brain. If it's a quantum effect, you know, you can have quantum non-locality, you can have entanglement between people, you can have, you know, parapsychology. it's really a pandora's box to all kinds of non-local effects including you know near-death and out-of-body experiences uh end-of-life brain activity which has been documented even afterlife and and reincarnation i mean you can't rule it out if consciousness is a process in space-time geometry the door is open to all that stuff yeah so uh i you know it's uh people they can ridicule it, but we don't know.

1:12:54I mean, you can't, you can't say no. I think it's, you can't rule it out. That's for sure. And I think it's quite possible. Yeah. Okay. We're, we're over well over an hour. Let me just say one more thing, two more things. We've done our own experiments showing quantum, we are part of a big study with other theories of consciousness. Our prediction was we would show quantum effects in room temperature and microtubules, and that they would be inhibited by anesthesia. And we showed that. And that was in the Templeton project. So I claim that we have more evidence, far more evidence, a little bit compared to nothing for everybody else, for our theory of consciousness compared to the computational theories, which have no evidence, as far as I can tell.

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