Brains and Strings 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.

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