This is a world of changed plans, of sudden opportunities, of unexpected visions. For in this world, time flows not evenly but fitfully and as a consequence, people receive fitful glimpses of the future.

Einstein's Dreams, p. 86, Alan Lightman

It's a good meeting with many hundreds of people. However, the majority of published abstracts in the extensive catalog are downright ignorant, vague and crackpot of the "not even wrong" variety. I will only comment explicitly on the good stuff IMHO. The vast Army of would-bes paid their $300 admission to support Josephson, Chalmers, Dennett, Stapp, Penrose, Davies, Lockwood and others of intellectual significance and competence who are all here. If anything, the meeting is too democratic leaving too little time for the people with something to say to say it in enough detail.

These commentaries, dedicated to, Rashi De Troyes (1040-1105) who is my alleged ancestor according to a strange story told to me by my cousin, David Padwa, started from brief notes made on the run between meetings. I am now adding to them as my memory unfolds out of the implicate into the explicate. Somewhere beyond spacetime, The Mind of God hangs suspended in the Hilbert raum of Wheeler's superspace guiding the evolution in time of the three-dimensional space geometry of our Universe

-- at least in Bohm's pilot wave theory of quantum gravity that, according to Penrose and Nanopoulos, forms the substratum of our consciousness. Quantum back-action of the space geometry on the wave function of the Universe would then provide a dialogue or feedback-control loop between Man and God. Like My Father's House, in this meeting there are many parallel sessions -- if not worlds. Hameroff has done a good job organizing the conference.

Many of the papers at this conference in neuro and cognitive science presented amazingly effective techniques for manipulating and controlling states of consciousness. The potentials for these techniques of mind-control to be used in the field on unsuspecting naive populations in "nonlethal warfare" are awesome to behold and contemplate. They can be and will be easily misused by authoritarian immoral power structures. These techniques not only involve manipulation by drugs and ordinary electromagnetic, sound and kinaesthetic signals as in subliminal television broadcasting and virtual reality transmission via the World Wide Web of the Internet, but also purport to involve quantum action at a distance in the reports on psychokinesis, telepathy and remote viewing. Murray Gell-Mann in his book, The Quark and The Jaguar vehemently denies the reality of the quantum voodoo that Einstein called "telepathic" and "spooky". He says remote viewing is "the story distorted", but he is lulling the public into a false sense of security. We will see below that E. J. Squires punches holes in Gell-Mann's argument. It is important to note in in this context that Cornell's D. J. Bem, initially a skeptic and a magician like James Randi, gave an orthodox "meta-analysis" showing that Ganzfeld telepathy is a real replicable effect!

Nonlethal psychic warfare using the distant manipulation of the consciousness of the "enemy" will be an important factor in the 21st century. It is preferable to the old means of war. At the risk of crying Casandra, I must note that the cancerous growth of population and diminishing resources means that large decreases of population in the near future are impossible to avoid barring some breakthrough in space propulsion that would allow large numbers of us to migrate to virgin worlds. Michael Lockwood's close friend, Oxford physicist, David Deutsch has published a remarkable scenario on virgin worlds in Physical Review D based on one version the several many-worlds interpretations of orthodox quantum theory using closed timelike worldlines. Let's hope that UFOs are real and that they are time travelling ships from friendly ETs, or time travellers --- our descendents coming back from the future like in the film Twelve Monkeys, using the Alcubierre warp drive or traversable wormholes, because if they are not real, it looks pretty grim for your children and their children. The numbers are not good. A recent conference updating Schrodinger's classic book What is Life recently held at Trinity College, Dublin gives a detailed report on this.

The world population is currently growing hyperbolically .... exponential growth .... involves successive doublings at equal intervals of time, with hyberbolic growth, these intervals become steadily shorter ... there will be 12 billion people in 2020 and in 2040 the growth curve will tend asymptotically to infinity! ... Near such a singularity, even the smallest fluctuation can be amplified and come to have an enormous effect. Catastrophes ... will limit the growth of world population...

Manfred Eigen, What is Life? The Next Fifty Years, p.6

(Murphy & O' Neill ed., Cambridge, 1995)

J A Hobson from the Harvard Medical School gave a good talk "The chemistry of conscious states: how the brain changes its mind" on the role of neurotransmitter ratios determining the "contents of consciousness".

In my theory, the brain changes its mind because of back-action which violates orthodox quantum mechanics. The mind can change its attached brain in orthodox quantum mechanics, but the brain cannot change its attached mind because there is zero back action in orthodox quantum mechanics. Stapp appears to disagree with me on this. Even though Stapp published a back-action theory in the July 1994 Physical Review A, he thinks back-action would only be important for anomalous paranormal phenomena not for ordinary qualia. I will keep hammering on this theme which is a Wagnerian leitmotif in this emerging pattern of my struggle to pull The Sword from The Stone.

Hobson presented an interesting 3D state space model providing a clear distinction between waking and dreaming states. This distinction is not so clear in my mind most of the time! :-)

They know that the body is not a thing of wild magic, but a collection of chemicals, tissues, and nerve impulses. Thoughts are no more than electrical surges in the brain...

Einstein's Dreams p.25, Alan Lightman

Dennett is a large well-proportioned man with an impressive beard resembling Moses coming down off the mountain. Henry Stapp told me he thinks Dennett is contradicting himself. Dennett basically says classical physics is enough to solve the "hard problem" of consciousness which is the explanation of subjective experience.

David Chalmers and Michael Lockwood gave two good introductory talks on the hard problem. Chalmers told me he thinks my back-action theory is "interesting" because it is testable in principle, and if it passes the tests he says I would be considered a "genius". He insisted that he understood the point I am trying to make. Up until his seeing my back-action theory Chalmers favored a many-worlds view, now he may be less confident. I have asked Chalmers to clarify his position on this for this page.

V Norris (vjn@leicester.ac.uk) gave a good talk on "Are bacteria conscious?". Single-celled organisms, like Escherichia coli, are quite complicated from the microtubule point of view.

Well back to the meeting, Penrose is talking soon. More anon.

Consider a world in which cause and effect are erratic. Sometimes the first precedes the second, sometimes the second the first... A young woman sits near a fountain ... Suddenly her heart soars, she blushes, she paces anxiously, she becomes happy for no reason. Days later, she meets a young man and is smitten with love. Are the two events not connected? But by what bizarre connection, by what twist in time, by what reversed logic?

Einstein's Dreams, p40, Alan Lightman

I am sitting next to Brian Josephson at a bank of computers. Brian is defending the reality of parapsychology experiments in the Times Higher Educational Supplement. We had breakfast with Ed May (and Spottiswoode) who took over the CIA and DIA-supported remote-viewing project at SAI from Hal Puthoff who is now working on zero-point exotic propulsion possibilities for star ship drives. I was contacted by NASA Houston to join a workshop on this along with Robert Forward, Greg Benford and other visionaries. Ed May has a macho "no nonsense" almost redneck disdain for basic theories that purport to explain the anomalous information transfers he is investigating. This may be a defense mechanism of over-compensation since most establishment scientists, like Murray Gell-Mann, founder of the Santa Fe Institute who controls the Mac Arthur Foundation grants, would, incorrectly I think, claim that he is doing pseudo-science. Spottiswoode is definitely the theorist of the two while May prefers to play Faraday.

I missed Penrose because WIN95 on my laptop started acting irrationally in trying to make a connection to WELL. But apparently Roger did not say anything new that is not in his previously published work. The interesting encounters will be Nanopoulos confronting Penrose and Stapp confronting Dennett.

E. J. Squires gave a rousing talk "What are quantum theorists doing at a conference on consciousness?" chaired by Paul Davies who is very funny and theatrical in a sort of Monty Python way. Some excerpts from Squires's talk

if quantum theory really applies to all systems, then, except in very special circumstances, there can never be any observations, i.e., there can be no events for which the above statistical predictions apply

suppose Melinda had agreed to write a 0 on a piece of paper as soon as she knew whether the system was in the state + or the state -. Note that she does not write down what it is, only that she knows what it is ... we cannot run this argument with a computer ... It works because Melinda is conscious and it therefore makes sense to talk about "knowing". Computers, on the other hand, do not know anything, and we would not have any way of giving the essential instructions to write a 0 as soon as the result is known.

The complete description of the "physics" in orthodox quantum theory is the state ... which contains both terms, i.e. both "results". The unique result of which I am aware does not exist in physics- but only in consciousness. The Born rule does not have anything to say about physics- it says something about consciousness.

Squires demolishes many-minds theories. In particular, although he did not explicitly mention Gell-Mann by name, he, in fact, destroy's Murray Gell-Mann's false claim that there is no faster-than-light "nonlocality" in the many-worlds or many-histories interpretation. Gell-Mann should retract his Chapter 12 "The Story Distorted" in his book The Quark and The Jaguar. Squires said:

It is sometimes stated that one of the advantages of the "many-worlds" style of solutions to the measurement problem is that they do not suffer from the non-locality which is all too evident in the Bohm model or in collapse models. To some extent this is true; the non-locality is removed from the physics because it only arises from the results of measurements, and so does not occur if there are no such results. However, it is still around; it has simply been removed to "consciousness".

there is no natural measure of a continuous infinity: it just does not mean anything to say, for example, that "more" minds see one result than another....

consciousness actually selects one term ... Normally this will happen at random with the weights given by ... the Born rule ....

there may be circumstances in which there is a quantum superposition in the brain which is not correlated to things outside the brain ... Then the selection, which perhaps need not be random, could determine the action that a person takes. This would correspond to our experience of free-will,

although it would not alter the total wave function

4. April 12, 1996, 9am

Nanopoulos gave his talk. He did not have time to mention Dennett as Mach as he had intended the night before. The contents of his talk are essentially already on this website here. There is some confusion over discrepancy in computation of number of neurons per thought in comparing the Penrose gravity reduction formula to the Nanopoulos string-derived formula. It seems to be seven orders of magnitude, but that may not be the case. As soon as I get clarification from both Nanopoulos and Hameroff I will report.

Nanopoulos emphasized several incredible facts in his talk yesterday. A microtubule is essentially an Ising lattice of 2-state systems rolled into a hollow tube. This is a many-body system that can be treated by standard methods.

The first amazing coincidence is that there is a mathematical isomorphism between this Ising model and the string-induced quantum friction of the Nanopoulos gravity-collapse theory.

The second synchronicity is the actual tiling of the 2-state dimers around the tube which corresponds to the most efficient error-correction code derived from the close-packing of hyperspheres. There is a connection of this microtubule spatial-coding scheme and the DNA spatial code. This is a clue that the microtubules form a quantum computer that cannot be ignored.

The third coincidence noted by Nanopoulos is that his "bottom-up" string-virtual blackhole quantum friction addition to quantum theory is formally identical in structure to the top-down phenomenology of Ilya Prigogine's irreversible thermodynamic theory of the self-organization of open systems.

The fourth amazing coincidence is that Nanopoulos derived Avogadro's number of 10^24 as the effective quantum-classical divide for protons from his string formula using the coupling constants from standard gauge force theory.

In addition, I note the fifth amazing coincidence that my quantum back-action theory (see below) based on extending the Bohm pilot-wave theory to include a reaction force of particle on its attached wave is a general template into which the Nanopoulos, like the GRW theory, fits. As seen below, Bohm shows that these GRW-type theories, in which the rate of decoherence increases with the number of particles forming the complex quantum structure, can be generally derived in the pilot-wave picture by making the collective pilot wave depend directly on the actual positions of its attached particles. This gives an extension of quantum mechanics corresponding to Penrose's "orchestrated reduction" (OR). As Nanopoulos said, one cannot use a "pure" state wavefunction for complex systems over long times because of quantum foam friction. One must use a "mixed" density matrix theory with an "extra" (i.e., my "back-action") term. The numerical coefficients in this back-action term are computed explicitly by Nanopoulos's superstring theory. Physically then, the massive superstring states at 10^19 Gev reach down into the 1ev level of our biology to form a feedback control loop between our quantum minds and the material motions in our bodies. Nanopoulos describes this effect as a "global" or "nonlocal hidden variable". The extra back-action term in the density matrix equation for the complex open quantum computing system also provides the "friction" that accounts for our experience of the flow or arrow of time. This arrow is negligible for single elementary particles, but dominates at our level of complexity.

Hameroff replied to objections from Franks, Lieb, Churchland and others, but he did not have enough time to make a case that could be understood in detail. I have a copy of his paper with Penrose that I will comment on extensively here soon. The Hameroff-Penrose (HP) theory is, like my theory, consistent with the Chalmer's criterion that sentience or mentality is a "FUNDA-MENTAL" (Hameroff's joke) property of the Universe. (HP) want to "embed" mentality in the "blistered" space-time geometry. They do not seem to be aware of the fiber-bundle picture in which mentality forms "fibers" in hyperspace above and beyond spacetime which is the "base-space" of the fiber-bundle. Hameroff did make several models which show how the quantum coherence can be protected from thermal decoherence.

In a world of fixed future, there can be no right or wrong. Right and wrong demand freedom of choice, but if each action is already chosen, there can be no freedom of choice. In a world of fixed future, no person is responsible .... The chemist thinks all these thoughts as he steps along the path ...He breathes the moist air and feels oddly free to do as he pleases, free in a world without freedom.

Einstein's Dreams, p. 162, Alan Lightman

I note that the two-state extended quantum theory of Aharonov shows how both future post-selected ensembles and past pre-selected ensembles influence what happens now in-between. The explicit future-to-past quantum influences would not show up in the traditional Born probability measurements of orthodox quantum theory. But these precognitive remote viewing phenomena would show up in what Aharonov calls the qualitatively new "weak" measurement from the interference between past and future. It has been shown that the Born probability interpretation, in the Bohm pilot wave theory, is due to the thermal equilibrium of nonlocal hidden variables. Non-equilibrium distributions, which may be an intrinsic property of life, would permit superluminal and precognitive message decoding using nonlocal correlations as the communication channel. This, of course, violates the statistical predictions of orthodox quantum mechanics and is a new post-modern physics for the 21st century.

Churchland did not go into the moral implications as I have done. She is correct, but what she did not acknowledge, perhaps because she has not yet realized it, was that the new models of Josephson, Penrose, Stapp, Nanopoulos and myself extend quantum mechanics and permit morally responsible free will in accord with "folk psychology" (e.g. David Hodgson's The Mind Matters). I include Stapp in the above list because of his July 1994 Physical Review A paper (p.18) in which he is ready to violate the Born rule to explain anomalous paranormal phenomena. However, Stapp does think that ordinary qualia do not require a violation of orthodox quantum theory. I, and apparently Josephson and Squires, think that even ordinary consciousness requires a new kind of intentional controllable non-randomness violating the complete indeterminism of orthodox quantum theory. This can come about because of back-action in the pilot wave theory, or because of a non-thermal distribution of the nonlocal hidden variables at the sub-quantal string-foam level of Nanopoulos, or, perhaps because of Aharonov "weak measurement"effects. Perhaps all of these approaches are facets of the same mechanism.

Herbert Frohlich's widow, the still-very beautiful Fanchon is attending the conference. She studied with Rudolph Carnap, and is a painter dividing her time between Paris and Liverpool. I plan to post her work on the WEB soon. I first met Frohlich in the halls of UCSD when he was visiting Bernd Matthias. Frohlich discovered the isotope effect in superconductors which was an important clue to Bardeen, Cooper and Schreifer in their discovery that quantized crystal lattice oscillations called "phonons" provided an effective attractive force to bind electron pairs into a superfluid boson condensate in the second order phase transition from a normal electrical conductor to a superconductor at low temperatures. Frohlich became close to my thesis advisor Fred Cummings and I published some papers in Frohlich's journal Collective Phenomena. One of those papers on strong gravity in hadronic physics attracted the interest of Abdus Salam who consequently invited me to his Institute in Trieste. Frohlich invited me to Liverpool when I was an Honorary Research Fellow with David Bohm at Birkbeck College in 1971.

The Frohlich pumped electric dipole membrane oscillations play a vital role in the microtubule models of consciousness. I noted in a question session that the pumping makes a population inversion corresponding to an effective negative temperature. The coupling of this negative temperature to surrounding positive temperature allows a quantum Carnot engine of greater than 100% efficiency. That is, heat flows from both the hot negative temperature bath and the cold positive temperature environment are converted to useful mechanical work. That is, the second law of thermodynamics says

But quantum mechanics says that in this "laser" case

Not only that, it is easy to have

so that

5. April 12, 1996, 2:30 pm

UCB philosophy professor, the charming John Searle, gave a humorous informative sensible talk in which, among other things, he pointed out that the objective-subjective distinction is a different basis of representation than is the epistemic-ontological distinction. Therefore, it makes perfect sense to talk of a subjective ontological structure such as consciousness. Thus, for example, applying Searle's remark to my theory, the Bohm pilot wave of the quantum Eccles Gates connecting mind to brain, is an ontological subjective structure of qualia.

In Bohr's paradigm:

Scientists turn reckless and mutter like gamblers who cannot stop betting. Scientists are buffoons, not because they are rational but because the cosmos is irrational. Or perhaps it is not because the cosmos is irrational but because they are rational. Who can say which is an acausal world? In this world, artists are joyous...

Einstein's Dreams, p. 41, Alan Lightman

Many neuroscience-types have asked me to come up with a "consciousness meter" to measure the mind-field directly the way we would an electric field. If, the mind field is a macroscopic quantum state of some pumped collective matter modes in the brain, and if conscious events correspond to Aharonov's "weak measurements" that violate the Born probability rule, then it may be possible to, one day make such a consciousness meter because Aharonov has indicated how even the wave function of a single particle can be directly measured. Until this breakthrough, it was thought that only the modulus of the complex-valued wave function could be measured. It should be easier to measure the mental wave function of the brain since it is more like a superfluid order parameter which is measured by the Josephson effect. Indeed, use of SQUIDs on the brain may be measuring this order parameter. The 40 Hz global brain oscillation measured by Francis Crick may be some kind of superfluid AC Josephson effect oscillation. Recall that superfluid helium II has a gravitational Josephson effect analogous to the original electrical effect in superconductors. The brain may show some hybrid combination of the two. This is all very tentative and "wild" speculation at this moment that spontaneously erupted out of my sub-conscious information processing much like "automatic writing" or "New Age channeling". So this particular substring of text is like a virtual particle which may not be up on this web page for too long since it violates conservation of sanity! :-)

6. Monday April 16, 1996. 3pm

I am in San Diego trying to make sense of the week before. There was too much stuff and not enough time. Smaller workshops are now needed so that the key ideas can be explored in depth. I did get a chance to talk to Henry Stapp extensively on Saturday night and to clarify our differences as well as similarities in our respective models of the quantum brain.

Stapp uses traditional or "orthodox" Bohr theory and, contradicting Patricia Churchland's argument, thinks that is enough to explain consciousness qualia and intentional free will. He thinks that if anomalous phenomena like psychokinesis (reported by Roger Nelson of PEAR at this conference) and remote-viewing are facts, then that will involve a violation of orthodox quantum mechanics. In contrast, I say that all mental states require back-action which is a violation of the Born probability rule of orthodox quantum mechanics. In my theory ordinary consciousness as well anomalous esp phenomena are essentially the same process on different time and space scales. If the brain is acting as a quantum computer to make the decision, then intention must correspond to the halting of the quantum computer. Is this compatible with the usual Born rule?

Stapp says that the collapse of the wave function (actually density matrix to be more precise) of the brain is the subjective experience of qualia. Stapp says that morally responsible free choice or intention is possible without violating the Born rule because the sensory input to the brain combined with past memory prepares a coherent superposition of possible future behaviors. Note that Stapp's position here not only contradicts Patricia Churchland's point that complete indeterminism precludes free will, it also contradicts Squires remark

there may be circumstances in which there is a quantum superposition in the brain which is not correlated to things outside the brain ... Then the selection, which perhaps need not be random, could determine the action that a person takes. This would correspond to our experience of free-will,

In contrast you are driving your car and you see a red light. This external perturbation to your brain Hamiltonian based on some kind of comparator mechanism shapes the Hamiltonian such that, for example,

I also met Aharonov's student Tollaksen that same evening. He confirmed that the Aharonov two state theory really means that the clash of future and past influences creates what happens in the now. He did say that they have not come up with a scheme to send messages back in time this way. But this is not clear. Aharonov does talk of a quantum time machine. I can see that "strong" measurements that obey the Born rule will not give anything anomalous like precognitive remote viewing, but what about the "weak" measurements which evade the Born rule. This may correspond with back-action. I would tend to say that all mental experience requires "weak" measurements. Stapp would tend to say that only anomalous mental informational transfers do. None of this is clear yet but we are definitely evolving new approaches and ways of thinking about the mind-matter problem that are testable. Like my ancestor, Doctor Frankenstein, I envision using nanotechnology to make artificial microtubules etc and to see if we can make artificial conscious life. :-)

7 Wednesday, April 17, 1996

... in spontaneously broken symmetry theories, the Lagrangian is invariant under some group G of continuous symmetry transformations; however, the minimum energy state or vacuum or ground state... of the system is not invariant under the full group G, but is under one of its subgroups... In this case .. the vacuum is an ordered state and collective modes (called Nambu-Goldstone bosons) propagating over the whole system are dynamically generated and are the carriers of the ordering information (long-range correlations) ... the quantum numbers characteristic of the collective mode acts as coding for the ground state: ordering and coding are achieved by the (Bose-Einstein) condensation of collective modes in the vacuum... the collective mode is a gapless mode and therefore its condensation in the vacuum does not add energy to it .... infinitely many vacua with different degrees of order may exist, corresponding to different densities of the condensate ... in the case of open systems these transitions (among vacua) may occur ... due to coupling with the external environment ... the value of the order parameter is related to the density of condensed Goldstone bosons in the vacuum ... the value of the order parameter may be considered as a code number ...

... following Frohlich... the symmetry to be spontaneously broken in living matter is the the rotational symmetry for electrical dipoles.... living matter is made up of water and other biomolecules equipped with electric dipoles.... The electrical dipole density thus plays the role of an order parameter and the associated Goldstone modes have been named dipole wave quanta (DWQ)..

the DWQ may acquire an effective nonzero mass due to the effects of the system finite size. Such an effective mass will then introduce a threshold in the excitation energy of the DWQ so that in order to trigger the recall process an energy supply equal to or greater than such a threshold is required. Unsufficient energy supply may be experienced as "difficulty in recalling". At the same time .. the threshold may positively act as a "protection" against .. thermalization and contribute to the memory state stability...

Water coherent domains are therefore protected against thermalization. ... external stimuli imprinting information trigger the spontaneous breakdown of symmetry ... The recall process is .. the excitation of the DWQ modes under external stimuli of a nature similar to the ones producing the memory printing process ...

When the DWQ modes are excited the brain "consciously feels" the pre-existing ordered pattern in the ground state.

To review: I use Dangerous Dan Dennett's definition of "qualia" as the immediately experienced "qualitative properties of mental states". The raw feel is elemental in the Universe, and I make the postulate that Bohm's pilot wave is Libet's field of sentience or Sir James Jeans field of "mind-stuff". Changes in the field of mind-stuff induced by back-action form the qualia. Non-zero back-action violates the Born probability rule and corresponds to a nonthermal distribution of nonlocal hidden variables (as enunciated in a paper by Valentini), perhaps of the Nanopoulos "superstring" or "W2 Global state" type. Back-action is zero in ordinary quantum mechanics. This is consistent with Penrose's claim that a really new physics is needed to explain consciousness. My theory is compatible with Penrose's idea of "orchestrated reduction", but there is an apparent conflict with Stapp's theory which purports to derive qualia from the ordinary unorchestrated collapse which obeys the Born probability rule. Stapp is only ready to violate the Born probability rule for anomalous phenomena like telepathy, psychokinesis and precognitive remote viewing.

Unlike the Bohr- type interpretations, there is a clear ontological distinction (in the Bohm pilot wave theory) between the electrical dipole wave (whose domain is in physical space) and its attached quantum pilot wave (whose range is in Hilbert space and whose domain is in classical configuration space). The Hilbert space is a fiber outside of or beyond physical space, but projecting into it. The excitation of the DWQ measurable in physical space must back-act on the pilot wave in Hilbert space to generate the quali or "feel". It is the change or perturbation in the pilot wave attached to the physical DWQ which must be the conscious feel or quali. The change in the mental pilot wave patterns is a mirror or homomorphic image of the corresponding change in the configuration of the particles and electrical fields of the brain to which the pilot wave is inseparably attached. Note, however, that teleportation of quantum states is possible, and this may imply the possibility of transference of qualia between widely separated brains or artificially conscious quantum computing machines. This quantum teleportation may even portend a kind of immortality in spite of Jaron Lanier's trepedations about AI expressed at this conference. Jaron is correct about classical AI, but I am talking quantum AI.

Vitiello keeps talking of a strange "time-reversed mirror" mode in the environment that pairs off as a nonlocally quantum-connected Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky (EPR) twin or doppelgaenger to a DWQ quantum. In other words, Vitiello has a nonlocally correlated pair of quanta one in the dipole wave and its time-reversed twin in the "environment". He claims that this nonlocal quantum connection or entanglement between the two quanta, one in the Frohlich wave the other in the external environment, "can be seen as a self-interaction term" of the Frohlich mode in which the environmental twin is part of the "self-recognition" process.

Vitiello has a detailed mathematical model of dissipative damped quantum oscillators, in which the coupling to the environment undergoes the "superconducting" Bogoliubov pair transformation yielding a double mode or paired squeezed Glauber-coherent "memory state". Squeezed states are able to operate at very low noise fluctuation levels in the sensing degree of freedom. The sensing degree of freedom has a canonically-conjugate noise degree of freedom with a compensating very large noise fluctuation level. Squeezed states are proposed by Braginsky for use in quantum engineering as ultra-sensitive detectors of, for example, the ultra-weak gravitational waves. The squeezed Frohlich membrane states might be able to detect Penrose's "single graviton" for his "orchestrated collapse." This is formally a theory of non-equilibirum biological superconductivity. There should be analogs to the Josephson tunnelling effect in neutral superfluid Helium which might explain the 40 hz Crick oscillation as well as something corresponding to the Meissner effect. This would be a kind of bio-SQUID effect built into our microtubule membranes.

The damping term in the second-quantized Frohlich dipole-membrane Hamiltonian emits and destroys the "mirror-in-time" EPR pairs. It is formally similar to the bottom-up GRW-Nanopoulos back-action term which gives an objective collapse time that depends on 1 over the number of particles N forming the complex system. It also corresponds to the term in Prigogine's top-down phenomenological theory that gives self-organization of dissipative structures. The mathematics here is similar not only to superconductivity theory, but also to the Unruh effect in semiclassical quantum general relativity in which a uniformly accelerating observer sees a thermal distribution of photons (which have EPR linked twins in a faraway region of spacetime on the Penrose diagram) analogous to the Hawking radiation in exploding mini-blackholes. There is an EPR pair in both cases. Vitiello does not make this connection. I just noticed it. In addition, Vitiello's brain state is definitely a massively parallel quantum computer.

... we thus conclude that the memory state and its time evoluted state are squeezed coherent states ... the resulting dissipative dynamics cannot be worked out without the introduction of the time-reversed image ... of the original system... the brain ground state may be represented as a ... superposition of infinitely many degenerate vacua or memory states ...each of them labelled by a different code number and each of them independently accessible to information printing without reciprocal interference. Many information storage levels may then coexist thus allowing huge memory capacity ... Memory states have also been shown to be squeezed coherent states. ... association of memories may ... occur ... due to the realistic finite size of the system, (boundary effects) making the memory states not exactly orthogonal.

the recall process is... the excitation of DWQ modes under an external stimulus which is essentially a replication signal of the one responsible for memory printing. When DWQ are excited the brain "consciously feels" the presence of the condensate pattern in the corresponding coded vacuum. The replication signal thus acts as a probe by which the brain "reads" the printed information.

we have seen that the [environmental twin] A tilde-system is the time-reversed image of the [Frohlich collective dipole] A system. Thus [the former] is the "mirror in time" system. This fact together with their role in the self-recognition process.. .... leads us to conjecture ... accepting the literary image of consciousness as a "mirror"

that the [environmental] tilde-system is actually responsible for consciousness mechanisms: Consciousness emerges as a manifestation of the dissipative quantum dynamics of the brain.

8 Saturday, April 20, 1996 (San Diego)

Thanks to Rhett Savage, who was at the conference, for giving me a copy of Sciama's student, Antony Valentini's paper, cited by Josephson, "Signal-locality, uncertainty, and the subquantum H-theorem. II" from Physics Letters A 158 (1991) pp 1-8. This is important background for anyone interested in a quantum physics of mental states both ordinary and extra-ordinary as in claims of remote-viewing. There was lots of background talk at the conference about someone named Nicolas Humphrey who apparently is attacking the claims of many of the presenters at this conference who are reporting paranormal experiments. I have not yet had the opportunity to examine Humphrey's ideas. The critical problem is the Born probability formula that the probability density is the modulus squared of the wave function, or, in density matrix theory, the expectation of the relevant projection operator. One way to understand the squared modulus is that it is the modulation of a retarded quantum wave propagating from past preparation to future detection by its time-reversed image which is the advanced "complex-conjugate" wave propagating from the future detection back to the initial preparation. Costa-de Beauregard has shown, many years ago, how to explain quantum nonlocality in this way. Aharonov's "two-state" theory is an extension in which an intermediate "present" measurement between the past "pre-selected" and future "post-selected" events is made. These ideas also relate to the Hoyle-Narlikar theory of the future "influence functional" in cosmology and the idea that the standard solution of general relativity for the Big Bang does not obey the final boundary condition of complete absorption of radiation needed to get retarded causality in the Wheeler-Feynman electrodynamics. Ref. Reviews of Modern Physics, January 1995.

signal locality (i.e., the absence of practical instantaneous signalling) and the uncertainty principle are valid if and only if the probability density equals squared modulus of the wavefunction. .... Signal-locality and uncertainty therefore emerge merely as properties of equilibrium from an underlying nonlocal and determinisitc theory.... for only in this special equilibrium does the uncertainty principle "noise" exactly mask the quantum nonlocality, so as to prevent instantaneous signalling ... this delicate balance between nonlocality and uncertainty .... gives a natural explanation for the uneasy 'peaceful coexistence" or "conspiracy", between relativity and quantum theory...

First recall that the GRW and Nanopoulos theories are all examples of "objective reduction" in which a new physical principle is added to orthodox quantum theory. The extra term in the density matrix equation of time-evolution is that the decoherence time scales as 1/N where N is the number of interacting particles in the complex system. Bohm and Hiley showed that back-action of the N particles on their attached quantum pilot wave gives a GRW theory. Therefore, objective reduction extensions of orthodox quantum mechanics can be pictured as a new kind of feedback-control loop between particles and their attached pilot wave which is able to violate the Born probability rule opening Pandora's Box to the use of nonlocal quantum correlations as a new kind of practical communication channel in which both superluminal and retroactive signals can be locally decoded in strong violation of the traditional idea that causes are always in the timelike past of their effects. Now Penrose and Hameroff do not go as far as I have just done, but what I say here is an inevitable consequence of the path they have taken.

we propose that ... quantum coherence ... and a ... phenomenon of quantum wave function "self-collapse" objective reduction: OR are essential for consciousness, and occur in cytoskeletal microtubules and other structures within each of the brain's neurons ... conformational states of microtubule subunits (tubulins) are coupled to internal quantum events, and cooperatively interact (compute) with other tubulins. We further assume that macroscopic coherent superposition of quantum coupled tubulin conformational states occurs throughout significant brain volumes and provides the global binding essential to consciousness....

For N tubulins, we have the product state |k):

Let's consider the simplest interesting system of N = 2 tubulins. Define

Quantum Coding Hyperspheres

N tubulins	sphere dimension
1	3
2	7
3	15
4	31

Here is the still-evolving version of the information I professed at the Tucson Conference.

The world, according to the late David Bohm, divides into objectively real, though mathematically complex-valued, quantum waves and objectively real classical particles and gauge fields. The classical particles and gauge fields always have quantum waves attached to them. For a many-particle system, the quantum wave function's domain is the system’s classical-mechanical configuration space not physical space. This is in contrast to Copenhagen-type interpretations (i.e., Bohr, Heisenberg, von-Neumann, etc. -- all are a wee bit different) in which the quantum wave is fundamental and the classical particle is not. Indeed, Bohm’s actual particle position in physical space has been called the "hidden variable". This is topsy-turvy since most practical measurements in quantum physics involve localized "particle" flashes in a detector. The quantum wave patterns build up in the statistics of the particle detections. It would be more appropriate to say that the wave is the hidden variable.

We restrict this discussion to non-relativistic quantum mechanics. Bohm’s theory appears to violate the Lorentz transformations of Einstein’s theory of special relativity at the individual quantum particle level. However, Lorentz symmetry is restored in the statistical quantum wave patterns. That is, there does appear to be a preferred rest frame in which the new nonlocal quantum forces act instantaneously. This fact is a bit ugly, but we must remember that there is a preferred global frame of reference in the standard cosmological "big bang" solution of Einstein’s general relativity field equations. The "co-moving Hubble flow" provides a new kind of covariant aether in which the cosmic photons from the big-bang are isotropic with a temperature that obeys the Planck blackbody distribution. The isotropy establishes an absolute global "rest frame", and the temperature establishes an absolute measure of global cosmic time from the big bang. Bohm conjectures that the quantum force is instantaneous in this global frame which suggests an interesting connection between a solution to classical general relativity and low-energy quantum mechanics. Special relativity is a local tangent space symmetry in general relativity. Therefore, the big bang Friedmann solution is an example of the spontaneous broken symmetry familiar in solid-state physics and in the standard model of elementary quark-lepton fermion sources and gauge boson forces. On the other hand, if we look at quantum electrodynamics we find the counter-intuitive surprising fact that the near field of virtual longitudinal and timelike photons is also instantaneous in every Lorentz frame of reference. This is because every Lorentz transformation between inertial frames in relative uniform motion induces a compensating internal phase symmetry or "gauge" transformation that re-adjusts the near field to be instantaneous in every frame. Can we impose this feature on the special-relativistic generalization of Bohm’s quantum force? This is a question for further research.

The quantum force is the negative spatial gradient of a context-dependent quantum potential that appears in the Hamilton-Jacobi equation for the particle derived from the linear Schrodinger wave equation. The quantum force’s context-dependence explains the wave-like guidance of the individual particle in the famous double slit experiment which the late Richard Feynman called the "central mystery of quantum mechanics". Context-dependence means that the guiding quantum force only depends on the "form" of the quantum potential and not its intensity or strength. This is because the quantum potential is the Laplacian of the amplitude of the wave function divided by that same amplitude. Therefore, multiplying the wave function by a constant does not change the quantum potential. Bohm calls this quantum force "active information" in which a small expenditure of energy is able to control a much larger expenditure of energy. This feature is dramatically illustrated in the quantum Carnot engine operating between a hot negative temperature and a cold positive temperature. The quantum wave is a kind of information wave. This is the same idea that David Chalmers calls for in his criteria for a post-modern physics of consciousness although he does not appear to be aware of the relevance of Bohm's theory in this context.

There is an actual point-like particle with a well defined position and momentum at each moment. There is also an actual gauge force field configuration, but in this discussion we only discuss the source particles. In fact the momentum of the particle is context-dependent determined as the gradient of the phase of the wavefunction at the actual position of the particle at every moment. This particle passes through only one of the two slits, but its attached objective wave passes through both slits. The recombination of the waves from both slits exerts a quantum force on the particle whose effects exactly reproduce the observed statistical coherent wave patterns for ensembles of particles whose initial positions are postulated to obey the Born probability rule. The conservation of probability current, derived from the linear Schrodinger equation along with the Hamilton-Jacobi equation, then ensures that the Born probability rule holds for all times. There is no conflict with the Heisenberg uncertainty principle since the statistical deviations of position and momentum measurements obey that principle. The actual particle trajectories are classically chaotic so that a small change in an initial position generally will result in an unpredictable and uncontrollable large change in trajectory over a short time. This, the simplest form of Bohm’s theory, is deterministic but not predictable. Bohm and Vigier later added a fundamental stochastic sub-quantal level which, according to Nanopoulos, originates in the virtual blackholes and super-string states of the quantum foam at the Planck scale of 10^-33 cm. In addition, the dependence of the wave of several particles on position in higher dimensional configuration space introduces the kind of "nonlocality" observed in the experiments testing Bell’s locality inequality.

We now come to "back-action" which is the main idea of this paper . The origin of this idea is Newton’s third law that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. We now know that this is a consequence of translational symmetry in physical space. Radiation resistance in Maxwell's electrodynamics is a kind of back-action of the field on its source. Wheeler and Feynman showed how this back-action is caused by advanced waves propagating backward in time from the future absorption of the radiation. Retarded causality then depends on the future final boundary condition of total absorption which is actually violated in the same standard big bang solution of general relativity I mentioned earlier -- as shown by Hoyle and Narlikar in the January 1995, Reviews of Modern Physics. It can also be shown that quantum spontaneous emission of real radiation by virtual zero point vacuum fluctuations can be explained as advanced wave effects from the future that are classically associated with radiation resistance. Feynman also used the term "back-action" to explain the generation of quantized vortices in superfluid helium.

The late Eugene Wigner, amplifying on von-Neumann’s "collapse" postulate in the Copenhagen-like interpretations, suggested that "consciousness" is essential for the completion of the quantum measurement. This entails a violation of the linear Schrodinger equation.

Note that the Hartree-Fock mean-field approximation for the spectra of many-electron atoms give an effective cubic nonlinear Schrodinger-like equation. The Heitler-London theory of the simple chemical bond and the Heisenberg model of ferromagnetism demand similar effective cubic nonlinearities which show up, for example, in the exchange integral. The exchange integral in the effective Lagrangian involves two electron densities or four wave function factors.The equation of motion from the action principle involves a functional derivative with respect to the wave function so the resultant nonlinearity is cubic. Cubic nonlinearities also show up in the Landau-Ginzburg equations for coherent macroscopic order parameters or giant effective quantum wavefunctions in second order phase transitions including superfluids, superconductors and lasers. The cubic nonlinearity is also found in the Higgs mechanism for mass generation of particles in the spontaneous breakdown of symmetry of the electro-weak force. The Goldstone modes from the symmetry breakdown add a new polarization component to the massless gauge bosons giving them rest mass. Fermion source particles can also acquire rest mass this way. The symmetry breakdown is from a tachyon field that undergoes Bose-Einstein condensation. The Goldstone modes are small subluminal quantized vibrations in the vacuum expectation value of the tachyon field. These nonlinearities in the Schrodinger equation which are generically induced in mean-field approximations to many-particle effects are swept away by second-quantizing the wavefunction so that it is now a creation and destruction operator of elementary excitations of collective modes in non-relativistic solid state physics. The second-quantized Schrodinger equation is now "linear" in the Fock space whose base states consist of different precise numbers of elementary excitations. Nevertheless, this is only a formal trick and the problems of the first-quantized theory are still there. The creation of antimatter at high energy has led to the idea that second-quantization is really more fundamental for relativistic theories, however, Bohm's theory which does not use second quantization may also be able to explain the creation and destruction of particles. This is also a problem for further research. Indeed Feynman's path integral formulation of relativistic quantum field theory does not use second-quantization and Bohm's picture can readily be integrated into Feynman's. Indeed, Feynman's theory is essentially an incomplete version of Bohm's without the actual trajectories. Therefore, in Bohm's theory as in Feynman's the creation and destruction of particle-antiparticle pairs at high energy correspond to actual particles turning around and moving backward in time. Feynman imposes a boundary condition which is a contour around the poles of the particle propagator in the complex-energy plane such that particles move forward in time with positive energy and backward in time with negative energy. This choice ensures microcausality. We must be prepared for exotic matter in which this boundary condition is violated. The exotic matter keeps star gate traversable wormholes from collapsing and permits the Alcubierre warp drive. One can also imagine new exotic processes in which the actual particles move in Hawking's imaginary time and also temporarily transform into tachyons on spacelike paths. These are all problems for further research. Note that the use of complex energy planes in Feynman's theory also demands the use of complex time planes since the two are related by a Fourier transform.

Wigner invoked the metaphor of Newton’s third law in the new context of the mind-matter interaction. He said that matter affects mind, but there is no corresponding reaction of mind on matter without the collapse of the quantum wave function brought about by consciousness. As shown by John Archibald Wheeler in his classic essay, "Law Without Law", this view leads to "delayed choice" actions backward-in-time (BIT) because we did not exist in the early universe and yet we observe light from the early universe. In effect, it is the future that actualizes the past in the von-Neumann-Wignerean view of quantum reality. Indeed, Roger Penrose and Henry Stapp have physics of consciousness theories based on this approach.

To summarize, Wigner uses the metaphor of back-action to say that mind acts on matter in the collapse of the wave function. Penrose and Stapp say that each qualia-event or moment of awareness requires a collapse in the wavefunction of the brain. It is assumed that there are mechanisms that preserve coherence over a time of the order of one second. The wave function is shielded from ordinary thermal fluctuations which would decohere it in times much shorter than one second.

Bohm’s theory is very different from the von Neumann-Wigner theory. First off, I identify "pre-mind" with the quantum wave attached to the relevant many-particle system. This is a new postulate that the potential for psychological "qualia" is a fundamental physical property of the universe in the sense defined by David Chalmers in his December 1995, Scientific American article. If we grant this postulate that the potential for qualia is as fundamental as charge or mass, and that this potential is identical with the quantum waves of certain particles of matter in biological and possibly other complex systems, then Bohm’s quantum force immediately explains how mind moves matter. Furthermore, in Bohm’s theory it is the quantum force that guides the particle into a given branch of the wave function in a measurement situation. This simulates Wigner’s idea that "consciousness" collapses the wavefunction. Bohm’s theory is one of "collapse without collapse". Therefore, I have given a more detailed explanation of Wigner’s idea in terms of a deeper idea due to a combination of Bohm’s and Chalmers’s views. We now have a new way of looking at the modern theories of quantum consciousness of Penrose and Stapp.

To make more contact with the standard quantum mechanics, we now see why it is that the guidance of the particle by the "mind-like" quantum force into a particular "eigenfunction" of the "observable" is, under usual conditions, unpredictable and uncontrollable. The latter two features are due to the fact that the linear Schrodinger equation has zero back-action in the sense that I mean it. Whereas Wigner’s idea of back-action was that of mind on matter, my idea is the exact reverse. The Bohmian back-action is the direct action of particulate matter on its attached guiding mind-like quantum wave whose support is in the configuration space of classical mechanics, and whose range is in Hilbert space. The result, however, is not incompatible with Wigner’s main idea and it, in fact, explains it in a deeper more elegant way.

The absence of back-action in orthodox quantum mechanics is mentioned by Bohm and Hiley in their book, The Undivided Universe.

"unlike what happens with Maxwell’s equations for example, the Schrodinger equation for the quantum field does not have sources, nor does it have any other way by which the field could be directly affected by the conditions of the particles. This of course constitutes an important difference between quantum fields and other fields that have thus far been used. As we shall see, however, the quantum theory can be understood completely in terms of the assumption that the quantum field has no sources or other forms of dependence on the particles. We shall in chapter 14, section 14.6, go into what it would mean to have such a dependence and we shall see that this would imply that the quantum theory is an approximation with a limited domain of validity." p.30

The relevant particles are probably the electrons whose spatial displacement controls the conformations of the protein dimers in the microtubules. It is their collective, perhaps Frohlich electric-dipole, wave form pumped far from thermal equilibrium which, I conjecture, is the physical substrate of our mental experience. All forms of life must have back-action in the sense defined above. Back-action is a necessary condition for the existence of any form of living matter in this theory.

Having come this far, things really start to get interesting. Going to Bohm and Hiley’s "section 14.6" we find:

"Other changes of this sort that might be considered would be to make the Schrodinger wave equation nonlinear and to introduce terms that would relate the Schrodinger wave function to the particle positions. One way to make Schrodinger’s equation dependent on the particle positions (so that there would be a two-way relationship between wave and particle) can be seen by considering equation (14.1). In this equation, we regard Rn as the actual position of the nth particle. From the same arguments as apply to the GRW (Ghirardi, Rimini and Weber ) approach, it would follow that the overall wavefunction would tend to collapse towards the actual particle positions, so that in a large scale system, the empty wave packets of our interpretation would tend to disappear." pp.345-6.

It is important to realize that the idea of the mind doing a quantum computation requires that there be no collapse or decoherence whilst the computation is in progress. The GRW theories postulate that the decoherence time depends inversely as the number of particles N that form the quantum computing hardware unit. GRW introduce ad hoc two new fundamental constants of Nature of 10^-5 cm or 100 nanometers for the scale of collapse, and 10^16 sec or a billion years which divided by N gives the decoherence time beyond which quantum computing deteriorates. Nanopoulos gives a more fundamental derivations of the decoherence time in terms of the masses of the particles. If we use the Nanopoulos formulae and my hypothesis that the human quantum biocomputing unit is at the electron level rather than the proton level, then the decoherence time for the number of electrons in our bodies is of the order of 100 years or approximately one human lifetime. If we use protons as the basic unit, the decoherence time is a factor of 10^20 shorter for the same number of particles. This means one has to use a much smaller number of protons to get the same decoherence time as one would get for electrons. Using protons and a decoherence time of 1 second gives an estimate for the basic unit of our experience. The numbers for this computed by Nanopoulos and Penrose need to be compared. One can imagine that the continuity of our long-term memory that lasts a lifetime is at the electron level in our microtubules while our more immediate short-term moment-to-moment experiences are at the proton level having to do with hydrogen bonds. The coupling between short-term and long-term memories would then have to do with the interaction of hydrogen bonds with the controlling electrons in the protein dimers of the microtubules.

One last wild idea before ending this rough first draft. Let’s play with a cosmological connection in the GRW model since Nanopoulos has already linked the "quantum friction" of the fundamental decoherence time to the quantum gravity foam. Suppose, the basic decoherence time is the Hubble size of the universe divided by the speed of light of about 10 billion years presently. This means that the basic decoherence time at the big bang before inflation was the Planck time of 10^-43 sec which is not unreasonable. Let us further suppose that the spatial scale of collapse, which does not appear to be in Nanopoulos’s theory is the geometric mean between the Planck distance of 10^-33 cm and the Hubble size of the universe multiplied by the square of the dominating gauge force coupling constant. Why the square of the coupling constant? Because that is what happens in the basic Feynman diagram for any interaction force between two sources via the exchange of a virtual boson. Every thing that happens is a composite of such Feynman diagrams in standard field theory. Well if we do this, we get about 10^-5 cm for the present epoch which agrees with GRW using the fine structure constant for QED and we get the Planck scale of 10^-33 cm at the big bang since all the coupling constants grand-unify to 1 before they get to the Planck scale in the standard ideas on the subject. So first homework problem - is there anything in astronomy which would falsify this idea? Can it explain the missing-mass problem and the apparent presence of stars older than the universe? It makes a very interesting prediction. It says that, in an open universe (e.g. Freeman Dyson’s "Time Without End") things get more and more quantum mechanical as the expanding universe gets older and older. That is larger and larger numbers of particles preserve their nonlocal quantum connections to each other over longer and longer coherence times, and therefore show macroscopic quantum effects over wider and wider spatial separations in the far future of the universe even though the density of particles may be decreasing to zero asymptotically. This is a prediction for the "Mind of God" (e.g. end of Hawking’s book, A Brief History of Time) because, on the basis of my idea that the act of quantum computing requires the suspension of decoherence, eventually all the matter in the universe will be quantum mechanical on the cosmological scale. If back-action is present, direct faster-than-light (FTL) communication between distant regions of matter in the open universe can happen. Eberhard’s theorem prohibiting such communication using nonlocal quantum connectivity only works in the limit of zero back-action. In this wild idea all the matter of the open immortal universe becomes part of a Vast Active Living Intelligence (i.e. Phillip Dick’s VALIS) or cosmological brain whose quantum wave function is the "Mind of God" in Hawking’s sense. This model is different from Frank Tipler’s Omega Point which requires a closed universe. My model is consistent with I.J. Good’s notion of "GOD(D)" that he introduced about fifteen years ago. Good worked with Alan Turing breaking the Nazi War Code.