Why Current AI Cannot Be Conscious | Dr. Christof Koch

0:00I experimented with psychedelics when I was young. I'm 70 now. And it very much informed my view of the world or view of reality or view of civilizations, structures and all of that. But could it simply be the suppression of the self and the resulting experience? It's just your brain. In the case of psychedelics, your brain on drugs. Okay, so all it teaches us that brains can reach extraordinary states. If you have someone in a vegetative state who's been declared in a vegetative state and you use this device and detect that there is complex neural activity that suggests consciousness, if you pull the life support on that patient, do you see some spike in complexity that might correlate to their recognition of what's happening?

0:52We now know that a quarter of these patients, one out of four of these patients, is actually conscious. They're there. They're present. They're just not able to signal it. If you lose the cerebellum, it's not good for you. Cerebellum is there to do sensory motor coordination among others. But people never complain that if lesion in the cerebellum, never complain about loss of consciousness. It doesn't seem to relate to consciousness because it's not very well integrated. Everything is mental. Everything is phenomenal. Everything ultimately is consciousness.

1:22I'm a physicist. I got my PhD in theoretical physics, but I've studied for the past 40 years brains. I'm a neuroscientist. I was for 25 years a professor at Caltech, California Institute of Technology. I had a lab studying the biophysics of the brain, but also cognitive neuroscience and the way people see and experience. And as you mentioned, I worked for 14 years with Francis Crick, the Nobel Prize winning molecular biologist who discovered you know i co-discovered the double helical nature of the dna and then shifted as he went from england to la jolla in southern california shifted his interest from molecular biology to consciousness i left caltech 15 years ago to join the paul allen institute paul allen the co-founder of microsoft for brain science here in seattle i was a chief scientist and then its president and I've stepped down from executive duties.

2:24I'm still employed at the Allen Institute, and I also run a foundation called the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation based in Santa Monica to study perception, what we call the perception box, and its therapeutic benefits for all people. So that's briefly my biography. Yeah, so as scientists, you are a physicalist. Well, it used to be known as materialist until early the 20th century. An ancient metaphysical position, Demokritos, one of the first pre-Socratic Greek thinkers, he famously said, all there is is atoms and the void. And today this is called physicalism that essentially asserts everything is physical.

3:14put differently everything is quantities is numbers now the devil's in the details and what used to be called physical or material if we go back to materialism was very simple to understand on a classical physics so on a classical physics you're taking object like this you know this is one of these things to you know train your muscles and it has position and velocity and momentum. And anything that has a position in a momentum under classical physics, you can completely determine its course, its past and its future. And if you knew the location and momentum of every particle in the universe, everything would be an open book.

4:03In principle, if you had a big enough computer, you can compute everything that happened in the past and everything that you expect to happen in the future. Now, of course, we know the world is not described by classical physics because one of the two revolutionary theories of the 20th century is quantum mechanics. So now we have this underlying thing that cannot be directly observed, the wave function. And the wave function is interpreted in a probabilistic way. And then, of course, to get from wave function to real things happening, you have so-called the collapse of the wave function. and you've got these weird paradoxes that are very paradoxical for us to understand because we don't observe them at our level.

4:47Things like can be simultaneously in two states. So Schrodinger's cat experiment where the cat is simultaneously dead and alive. And our intuition tells us, well, look, either you're dead or the cat's alive. It can be in both states. But under certain conditions, this is exactly what nature permits. More recently, although this goes back to Erwin Schrödinger, he had predicted this property of quantum system called entanglement. What we mean, so if you have a system, a single quantum mechanical system, and this relates to consciousness already, a single quantum mechanical system, you can separate them over vast distances, but they're still one system.

5:33What do I mean by that? So let's say you take a pair of entangled particles, one is spin up and the other spin down. So because they're in a superposition, the system could be like this. It's in a superposition of this state and this state. Okay, and you don't know which. And then you move them very far apart. Let's say a light year, such that you turn on a flashlight at one location, that light wouldn't get to the other location until a year later. So they're really, really, really far apart. Yet, what we know now to be true empirically, beyond a doubt, that as soon as something interacts with that one system, let's say the system on my left, and knows that the spin is up, instantaneously, independent of the distance, the state of the other one is down.

6:23yeah now did einstein famously called this in 1935 spooky action at a distance because what what what mechanism allows the information this day to propagate across vast distances and now there are even weirder thing called quantum contextuality that people are that people are testing we know this to be true because now we have a an industry called quantum computer industry that exploits some of these weird superposition but what that means that we don't know anymore what it means exactly to be physical and some people in the foundation of physics in fact are now arguing that there may not be absolute facts in the sense that i'm a biker i don't own a car i have several bikes my bike at rest has a particular mass it weighs like i don't know 25 kilo or whatever but quantum mechanics would say until and unless something interacts with that bicycle it doesn't have probably speaking a math it's not that you don't know the math the math that's just an epistemic limitation we you know i don't know more things in in the world no it's that it simply doesn't make sense to talk about it like it has a specific math until depending on the reading, either something observes it or otherwise interacts with it.

7:47Now again, this is not my grandfather's materialism anymore. So that's been one persistent challenge. And in fact, some physicists in foundational physics are now bringing in consciousness. They are beginning to argue that consciousness, in a sense, has to be built into at the rock bottom the rock bottom description of our of our reality so that demarcation line between physicalist and non-physicalist is is very very difficult to define and so people say well it's the future physics well okay but the future physics you know that's like waiting for for you know waiting for the rapture yeah maybe in future we'll have a physics and maybe that includes consciousness for all i know so um it's difficult to pin down physicalism the other challenge with physicalism has always been what the philosopher david charmas calls a hard problem yeah to explain why is it that three pounds of brain matter like this and in principle it's just like another piece of matter like this okay this is hard matter or semi-hard matter this is you know soft matter squishy matter but in principles it constituted out of atoms and molecules and electrons and all that interacting by the laws of quantum mechanics nothing special here yet this thing can love and hate well where does that come from and even if you take it down even if you carry out the program that francis crick and i initiated in the in the early 1990s of identifying for anyone experience what are the exact neurons in what state do they have to be do they have to involve microtubulee or superposition or whatever you want to come up with.

9:28Why is it that this particular mechanism, you know it's a mechanism like any other mechanism, like a fancy Swiss clock, why is it that this mechanism can feel pain or feel pleasure or feel boredom? I mean it's a complete non sequitur, right? On the one hand you have the laws of physics, on the other hand you have experiences, pain, pleasure, boredom, anger, you know they're linked, you know just a single hit on the head will tell you, yeah, if you hurt the brain, you're going to seriously interfere with conscience. But why should they be linked? There's nothing in the laws of science that tells us matter can love and hate.

10:10So those are the two challenges. And I mean, they've been around for several decades now. The neurocorrelates, exactly what was lighting up at the time that you were feeling or experiencing certain phenomena. And at what point did you decide that that wasn't going to be enough? I mean, I guess you knew that wasn't going to be enough, but you thought it was useful in the absence of some other empirical experiment that you... Well, if, assuming we had the, and of course, I lost a famous bet against David Schalmer, because we had not discovered them after 25 years. But he agrees with me they will be discovered.

10:56This is discovering the footprints of consciousness in the brain. It's another way to think about it. That is a perfectly feasible project, and that will be immensely useful because once I know what the footprints are, I can look for them. For instance, there are many patients that are behavioral unresponsive. They used to be called vegetative state. We now know that 25 % of these people are actually conscious, called covert conscious. They're fully conscious, or they may be fully conscious. We simply don't know, but they can communicate that to the outside. So they're like a standard astronaut.

11:31Well, if I have the NCC, I can just look. Are they present in this patient? I can decide, for example, most experts who concern themselves would assume that a third trimester fetus probably is conscious. Well, if I have the NCC, I can say, well, are they there? Or when do they occur? Are they present already in the second trimester or maybe only in the third trimester? What about here? I have a dog, Bernice Mound dog. What about dogs? You know, and I can, so this is an empirical program tracking the footprints of consciousness that will be immensely practical importance to the term consciousness, to measure it, maybe quantify it in normal people, in people with various diseases, disorders, psychiatric disorders, animals, etc.

12:21So it's useful, but of course it does not explain why this particular thing in this configuration gives rise to red and slightly different to orange or to an orgasm or to toothache right so there are two ways to look at that so one for the longest you have to start rather so most people who think about consciousness and make theories of consciousness they take the brain and try to squeeze the juice of consciousness out of it you know the trying to turn the waters of the brain into the wine of consciousness to adopt a biblical metaphor and they say well it has to be this thing it has to be a global workspace or broadcast of information or layer 5 neurons or nmda receptors or microtubule like stew hammeroff you know or whatever well again why this and not that why microtubule not other some some other cellular organism you know ultimately it's very difficult to go beyond that question so there's one theory that's unique really that's um called integrated information theory yeah it's a different attack it's a consciousness first account so it really starts where rene descartes started the what the only thing i'm absolutely certain of is that i'm conscious because even in doubting it I reassert it.

13:52And consciousness, furthermore, is the only way I encounter the world. If I'm a scientist, I still depend on, I have to read papers or books, that's visual consciousness. I have to look at an oscilloscope again. I have to listen to a Geiger counter, that's auditory consciousness. So the only way I interact with the world, including my own body, is through my conscious experience so if you think about it the only thing i have direct acquaintance with i i have direct knowledge of is conscious experience and so any theory has to start with with any theory of consciousness which is different from a theory of the neural correlates of physical substrate of consciousness any theory of consciousness has to start with consciousness and then sort of go from there to say, well, which system is conscious and what are they conscious of?

14:47And this theory, integrated information theory, the main architect of that theory is an Italian-born American psychiatrist and neuroscientist, Giulio Tononi at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is a theory that does that. Now, it's a scientific theory. It may well be wrong. yeah let me ask first of all i'm fascinated by you have a startup right that's that's working on an instrument or instruments that would be able to detect consciousness in in people uh who are otherwise considered brain dead how how far along have you gone in that have you abandoned that or Oh no, no, no, no. As I said, it's just independent what you believe about the metaphysics of consciousness.

15:40There's no question that we have now tools, so this was developed over the last 20 years, techniques to query the brain. Essentially you do it, you hit the brain using magnetic pulses, and then you're sounding, you're listening to the echoes using EG, electrical brainwaves. right so you send in a pulse of energy you essentially you know it's like taking a bell and hitting it with a hammer and then listening to it and a conscious brain whether that person is awake like you or i or in it in a in a REM sleep where the person is experiencing or on a high dose psychedelic where they may be immobile but highly conscious the complexity of this brain wave so you can compute the complex how complex is called lempel ziv complexity and if in conscious people it's always above a threshold in unconscious people whether they're regular people regular folk but they're anesthetized or they're truly in a very deep coma where it's unambiguous that they that there is no activity the brain complexity is very low in the simplest case yeah eg is flat lined i mean that's extreme case of very low complexity and so we've developed this tool now and started this company that you mentioned called intrinsic powers we were working with people at mgh at harvard and in in in madison and in in columbia trying to put this into the workflow because what happens today is if you or i have a car accident or hemorrhage or cardiac arrest and you're alive you know someone calls 9-11 you get into the icu you're on life support now on ventilator you might be there you know unresponsive eyes open so the these people were called vegetative states but as i said are now called behavioral unresponsive and if you remain in this state for three or four or five days then the the clinical team will initiate discussion with the family and says is this what they would have wanted and here in the developed world between 70 and 90 percent of the time family doctors decide no and they pull support but we now know that a quarter of these patients it was a very large paper last year published in the new england journal of medicine roughly a quarter percent depending on the demographics and all of that one out of four of these patients is actually conscious they're there they're present they're just not able to signal it and so we want to know that because then i can give this device can give the clinical team and the family one additional bit literally it's one bit are they there or are they not there and that can then help further inform you know what the doctor and and what the family wants to do with that information.

18:40So I like it a lot because, well, A, we help people, and B, it demonstrates that this very airy, ephemeral topic of consciousness, you know, it's been around with us for the last 3 ,000 years, seems very airy-fairy, right? But this, if you ever called upon this to make this call for a loved one, right, this is the most consequential decision you can make it's very existential are they there or are they not there and should we pull then you know should we pull the plug or not and so this is where the this this abstract mind body problem hits the you know the rubber hits the road yeah and let me just i don't want to get lost on that but have you how far are these experiments gone if you have someone in a vegetative state who's been declared in a vegetative state and you use this device and detect that that there is complex neural activity that suggests consciousness if you pull the life support on that patient Do you see some spike in complexity that might correlate to their recognition of what's happening?

20:00Or do you see any change in that complexity? No, because, I mean, the technique is, so it takes an hour, an hour and a half to establish. and then of course you know you have to make this you make this information available to the doctors and ultimately to them to the team and then it takes you know a lot of back and forth and it's it's complicated uh craig because it's a very complicated question and we cannot help so there's three when you get that call There are three things you want to know. Are they alive first? Are they there? And then lastly, are they going to recover? And right now we can't say that very well, whether or not the fact that they're conscious is encouraging, even though they may not be able to respond.

20:54right so um it's it's a very difficult decision to make do you think i mean imagine yourself if you are if you're in this situation unable to communicate and it's unclear it depends of course on your age if you're 20 it's much better than if you're you know 60 or 70 what would you like do you want to be forever in this in this state where you can't communicate but you're conscious Yes. And then, you know, now your brother or your sibling, I mean, or your parent or your child has to make this decision. So it's a very complicated decision environment. And because at this point we can't tell you, yes, he's there, and 95 % chance he's going to recover.

21:41I can't tell you that.

21:46So was that work concurrent with your work with Krik? Yeah, so this was primarily done, so we, you know, it's why this work on patients sort of widely published done over the last 20 years by Giulio Tononi and then an Italian neuroscientist, neurologist, Marcello Massimini. Yeah, and that went on at the same time as we, you know, tried to push this empirical program in people and in lab animals to study the footprints of consciousness in the brain. A purely empirical program that, by the way, does not depend on whether you're a physicalist or dualist or a pampsychist or an idealist. It's just we just want to know the footprints of consciousness, how to study them, how to measure them, detect them that we could then use for diagnostic and prognostic purposes.

22:43What point did you decide that you were never going to close that gap between correlation and causality and switch to a form of panpsychism. I mean, was it a moment or was it...? Well, first of all, I've never abandoned the hope that we can get a theory that explains, I mean, a theory like integrated information theory. And panpsychism, certainly the way I think about it is in the sense that it may well be possible a that every member every evolved organism including simple singles simple cells individual cells a mobile may feel like something itsy-bitsy okay and integrated information theory in principle because the vast complexity of the ten thousands of different proteins present even in a single cell is such no computers ever managed to simulate that out of all this vast complexity may arise some very very simple proto feeling of being alive as is not being alive that's entirely possible i don't know how to empirically test it right now but it's it's it's entirely it's entirely possible what happened to me is slightly different i had two extraordinary experiences that i describe in my last book then i am myself the world um one of which was sort of a near-death experience in the first week of the of the pandemic where uh christoph was gone the world was gone everything was gone except this light this very bright light some people describe it as a tunnel and a feeling of uh of terror and ecstasy just those three things terror ecstasy a bright light there was no space all of space had convulsed itself into the single the single point the singularity there was no time passage of time that's always with us collapse that's moment this experience didn't last too long or too short it simply was it was probably under 10 minutes by the clock and there was no self there was no christoph there was nothing there you know the usual distinction between observer and observe know and knowing apprehended and apprehended all of that was gone and so it it's what some buddhists often call a non-dual experience yeah it wasn't particularly pleasant i mean as i said it was terror and ecstasy yeah but not not it wasn't the result of a psychedelic experience it was something i uh yeah i prefer not to to talk about it yeah um but what it taught me is two things that a the sense of self you know we all have a sense of self explicit or implicit some people have it weaker they constantly belittle themselves you know they they constantly think oh my god everyone hates me and other people like our president have a let's just call it a highly exaggerated sense of uh of self um And it's always, we all live in this gravitational field of planet ego.

26:02It's always about me, me, me, explicitly, implicitly. But then just like an astronaut on a special condition can become weightless and floating out of space. So on a certain conditions, including psychedelics, of course, you can totally lose that self. And what you realize then that self-consciousness is just a subset of all possible experiences. the fact that i know i'm me i know what i had for breakfast i know i'm gonna die one day all of that is is is consciousness but you can also if you don't have that like in that state whatever remains is clearly highly conscious and then it took away the and the fear of death you know the which is not uncommon but then i had a second but it didn't change fundamentally my metaphysics the way i think about the world that happened several years later three years ago when i had a a mystical experience where again you lose a sense of self you lose where you are and what you are and you feel i mean it's very strange to put it in words you feel you become one with everything you merge with the universe and and i mean the title of this book then i must have the world comes from this um it's a translation from the german which is what tristan in isolde in richard wagner you know paulner's opera sing when they they have this mystical experience where they become one the two the the lovers become one but they also become one with the universe so they that's what they think then i i know the most rapturous music composed in the western canon they become one whatever remains become once with everything and that is you know profoundly transformative because you know once i came out of it i don't know how long it lasted probably under an hour um it's just i mean you now have direct acquaint i had direct acquaintance with what i felt was like what what is truly underlying everything is mental that i realized oh my god everything is mental everything is phenomenal everything ultimately is consciousness and this material universe in which we exist ultimately is a manifestation of something mental so this is known as idealism right they believe that no you know most of western mind body metaphysics revolves around these two poles the physical and the mental and you know since the greeks most people say well the only pole that really exists it's the physical and everything else has to somehow emerge out of that in ways we don't understand or some people say no it's both so that's your classical dualist most people are probably in this country probably dualist right there's clearly the brain and and matter and all of that but then there is my soul uh you know and that's separate uh and then of course and then they are idealists well then they also pump cycles like uh like uh joff you interviewed and then they are also idealist like arthur schopenhauer probably the best known 18th century uh early 19th century germ philosopher And then modern idealists like Bernardo Castro, who says what ultimately exists is mental.

29:30The mental follows laws. It's not supernatural. So it doesn't imply existence of a God or hierarchies of God, anything like that. It just says finally what exists or truly exists is something. It may be very primitive. It may be evolving under some sort of instinctual law or something. and that gives rise itself to and to the material and that's to me that's exactly what it felt like when i had this experience yeah uh and and the i mean i not to get into why i'm interested in this But, you know, I experimented with psychedelics when I was young. I'm 70 now. And it very much informed my view of the world or view of reality or view of, you know, the civilizations, structures, and all of that.

30:37How is that? What's that? I mean, how is that? In what way? Well, just in the way that you're describing, the breakdown of a sense of self and understanding, not a logical understanding, but the feeling that everything in the universe is all one thing. And so you're all made of the same stuff. Yes. And so what interests me about reading about your research, you identify in the Crick work, or maybe it happened after the Crick work, the areas of the brain responsible for the sense of self, for the experience of the self. And could it be that psychedelics in that self organizes perception in a way that you can operate in the world, manipulate the world?

31:41But if you remove that sense of self, which you have a physical correlate, then you're without that structure. And that gives you the feeling of oneness. But could it simply be the suppression of the self and the resulting experience? Yeah, rather than it. Yeah, go ahead. Yes. So a physicalist would say, okay, great. Great that you had this experience. Congratulations. But it's ultimately just your brain. In the case of psychedelics, yeah. So it's your brain on drugs. Okay. So all it teaches us that brains can reach extraordinary states. Now, if we just stay with that for a moment, what is still extraordinary are the fact that many of these experiences can be very transformative, almost always in a positive way.

32:37You know, we know this going back from psychedelics, going back to the research at Johns Hopkins, where people that have stage 4 cancer, where medicine is given up, we can't really do anything anymore, they're terrified of dying. They get a high dose of psychedelics and then they totally transform themselves. It doesn't cure them of the cancer, they will still die, but they are now willing, they have this completely transformed psyche. We know, for instance, there are hundreds of clinical trials, both here and abroad, doing psychedelics for treatment resistant depression, major depressive disorder, generalizing, PTSD, etc.

33:15etc. And we know through these questionnaires, MEQ30, the mystical experience questionnaire, that the extent to which people have a mystical experience in these trials directly correlates to the extent that they derive therapeutic benefit. So in other words, it's quite likely when that patient who's depressed has a mystical experience, in this case induced by psychedelic, no matter the underlying metaphysics will help them and they will they might fall out of they might not even score as a depressed anymore you know not immediately afterwards you know this is not an instantaneous effect but then you think about it you you know you cannot help i mean you must probably still uh craig think back about your experience right that you had 50 years ago so because you constantly think about it and and and you talk with other people about it you read about it maybe you have a therapist you talk to them about it and slowly it changes your entire life and your attitude your mo your motivation so independent of the metaphysics the fact that an experience that typically lasts under an hour that's you know you can't really control very well right can have this transformative experience itself is i mean you know nothing short of miraculous it's even more challenging to think about when you have near-death experiences so near-death experiences are very similar in character to this mystical experience people have showed that and these of course typically occur in a highly traumatic circumstances so for instance you have an in-hospital cardiac arrest right or you're you're near drowning or on the battlefield or a car accident where you bleed out so these are you know but all of our knowledge they should be massive causing massive trauma but instead people radiate this equanimity and they're content they say it's the most meaningful experience i've ever had in my life it totally changed my attitude to my loved ones so no matter what the underlying implicate metaphysical implication ask for first they are very they're among the most meaningful and profound experiences in that we know of period yeah independent of what you think about it yes but then there are these two obvious interpretation one is okay ultimately it's just your brain nothing else move nothing else to see move on, move on, nothing to see.

35:34Or you can say, no, what happened in those circumstances? And that's the road I'm trying to, I'm going down. Somehow your own, you, so usually we are, we have this boundary between my consciousness and your consciousness. I don't experience you directly. Right? To find out how you feel, I have to ask Craig, how do you feel? And you can be with your partner, your wife or your spouse, your bodies can physically penetrate, but you still don't know what she is or he is thinking. Ultimately, all you have is their words and their gestures, right? It's always indirect. So we live in a world where we each have our own planets, if we want, our own bubbles.

36:16But under certain circumstances, this boundary becomes dissociative or becomes sort of dissociates, dissolves and suddenly you now become part of this greater reality. That's my interpretation. And the question is, is this compatible with some currents in modern physics? Where, you know, given these weird quantum effects and entanglement, contextuality, etc. And the fact that you can't even define whether things exist without them interacting and being observed, Well, to what extent are these interpretations compatible with some of these foundational physics? I don't know. I'm talking a lot to these physicists.

37:07I organized a workshop on this topic, etc., to see can they be reconciled. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, there's the physicalist view. And what I'm hearing is that in your correlate work, your work on the correlates of consciousness, what neurons in the brain fire to correlate with certain mental states, that you just cannot close that gap between the physical and the experience. And so you offload it to, it's a fundamental property, and these complex neural mechanisms somehow can capture that fundamental property. and and and but but i guess my one question off that do we know yet or at least uh broad brush which parts of the brain consciousness depends on well okay so it depends on many things it depends on your heart you know if your heart doesn't beat you will faint within 10 seconds approximately so we know that it depends on mechanism in the brain stem and we know small strokes in the brainstem can render you dead or uh in coma where you're totally unresponsive but as fast we can tell you know given what that we can see these complex scenes that i see right now given that i can hear and you know be conscious of so many different things that is the property of the outermost layer of the brain the cortex you know which is really it's it's a it's a sheet like this you know like a cloth like millimeters so it's a like a pizza 12 to 14 inch pizza that thickness and you have two of them they're highly convert you know highly convolved and convoluted and they crammed into my left and my right hemisphere in particular it seems to be the back the back part of that structure that seems to give rise to seeing and hearing and touching and wanting, which are the modalities that we understand best.

39:35But that's under both, again, that's independent of whether you're a physicalist or an idealist, because we can, I think it's clear, the evidence shows that if you don't have these parts of the brain, you're going to be in severe trouble, or we can predict, I mean, Oliver Sacks wrote about 30 years ago, depending on which part of cortex are gone, you will have specific deficits, It's like you are unable to see your face. Although, you know, you can perfectly well see the eyes and the nose and the hair, but you don't have that conscious experience of a face anymore because he lost the neurons that convey that.

40:08So in that sense, there are footprints and you can track them and you can identify them. The question, do they give rise to consciousness? Or, you know, what is the nature of the substrate? or do you need a substrate at all? Yeah, and that's why I was so interested in Penrose and Hemroff's theory because they were trying to pinpoint a mechanism in the neurons of the brain that would channel or in which there would be some quantum effect and then you could offload consciousness to the quantum realm. How do you feel about that, about the microtubules? Well, leaving aside the microtubules, I think that's extremely speculative, and Roger Penrose is the first to admit that.

41:10Let's take the more general question. What do we know about quantum mechanics and consciousness? Well, we can even ask the empirical question. is there any evidence that quant that large-scale microscope microscopic quantum events are relevant to biology let's put it that okay so clearly the creatures like me and you and dogs and trees are subject to the same laws of quantum mechanics just like anything else right but of course they operate unlike if you go for example to quantum to google to quantum computers like google makes them They operate at 27 mK. So zero degree mK is absolute zero, no more molecular motion.

41:55We live at roughly 300 degrees Celsius, 300 degrees above that. So this is unimaginable cold. It's vastly colder than outer space because outer space is 4 degrees Kelvin, the background radiation. So you need extreme isolated environments, extreme vacuum to eliminate all this motion, the jostling of the molecules and the atoms that would eliminate these quantum mechanical effects. Given that biology on this planet evolved in what physicists would call a warm and wet environment, you know, with lots of water, the vast majority of people, of biologists and physicists argue, okay, biology, quantum mechanics simply isn't relevant for biology in general.

42:42Yeah, there are some special effects, like maybe where light meets the photons in your photoreceptors. But by and large, all these large scale, particularly like superposition and collapse, those things don't matter. So I have a collaboration with a bunch of people where we try very hard to show empirically that there are quantum effects, that things like nuclear spin do matter for biology. And there's some tantalizing evidence that we could go into, but it gets very technical about such hypothesis. But so far, the verdict is still, there's so far not a believable reproducible experiment that shows microscopic quantum mechanical effects in biology at room temperature.

43:34I see. Yeah. Although it must be there. I mean, to manipulate quantum states, yeah, you need to super cool them. But that doesn't mean that quantum effects stop happening at room temperature. Well, except that you're right. But then they would immediately within 10 to the minus 9 seconds wash out because, you know, everything is constantly vibrating. Yeah. You know, and so the way you operate quantum computers, you are in this incredible static environment where there's almost no more molecular motion and you can freeze it and then you get this superposition. Given that, you know, our brains are in this state, any superimposed or entangled state would immediately within, you know, a nanosecond disappear.

44:24So that's a challenge. Is there now, are there special protected environments? I mean, evolution is very clever and evolution had a lot of time to select things and anything not, this is also Stu Hamerhoff's argument, I agree with that, anything not ruled out by the laws of physics can in principle be exploited by biology in general and by neurobiology in particular. But right now we simply don't have any positive evidence for that. we and other people are trying but so far it's still uh nothing too convincing yeah one thing that fascinated me and in one of your talks you you talked about uh that under psychedelics the the is it the complexity or the electrical impulses slow down in uh in the brain where you would expect them to do the opposite.