SRH@CCIT.ARIZONA.EDU wrote:

SH: I had referred to Jack Sarfatti's criticism's as coming from the "left". He asks:

Stuart Hameroff wrote: From Stuart Hameroff (SH): Having been under siege from Jack Sarfatti (the "left"), Orch OR now comes under attack from AI/reductionists (the "right"):

Why am I the "left"? Most people view as on the "tight" since I helped formulate Reagan's Star Wars Strategy in 1981 as an informal part of the Neo-Conservative Institute For Contemporary Studies set up by Ed Meese and Cap Weinberger back in the 1970's. This period is described in the article "The Buttoned Down Bohemians" which appeared in 1986, as I recall, in the Sunday Magazine of The San Francisco Chronicle where my name appears in this context. Murray Gell-Mann in Ch 12 of The Quark and The Jaguar, Jeremy Bernstein in Quantum Profiles and N.D. Mermin in Physic Today (pun intended!) all refer to a famous letter I helped write for the Director of this prestigious and influential Think Tank which includes Milton Friedman, General Brent Scowcroft, William F Buckley Jr and many others of that class among its associates and supporters. You can also look in the book, Special Tasks, by former KGB officer Sudoplatov (the new paper back edition with a forward by Robert Conquest of the Stanford Hoover Institute), where my name appears in a political intelligence context which no one in their right mind would call "left"! This is all a matter of documented public record. Check it out. :-)

SH: Perhaps the political spectrum, like spacetime, is curved. If you start out in one direction, you'll arrive from the opposite. However comparing me to Nixon was cold, Jack. I'm not paranoid - it's just that everyone is out to get me. However I confess I really enjoy this sparring over Orch OR with you, and with reductionists who argue quantum effects are unnecessary.

Well comparing you with Nixon was a LEFT-handed compliment, because Nixon, despite his tragic flaws was a brilliant man, larger than life, the stuff of legends (e.g., Oliver Stone's NIXON), whether or not you agree with his political decisions. Nixon actually knew of my work through a personal conversation with Kim Burrafato (kimato@owm.com). He was a member of the "Pumpkin Papers" group of Intelligence Community leaders (of course!) that my sometime co-conspirator, North Beach schmoozing crony, the raucous Stephen Schwartz, a Surrealist Poet, author, and reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, is closely associated with.

Note added July 16, 1996: There seems to be a precognitive synchronicity here because right after this little left-right exchange I received this:

To: sarfatti@ix.netcom.com

From: MC ...... <.........>

Subject: J. Robert Oppenheimer

Date: Mon, 15 Jul 1996 13:26:26 -0400

Dear Dr. Sarfatti:

I donšt know if you remember me, but I spoke with you last fall at the recommendation of Stephen Schwartz. I am writing a book on J. Robert Oppenheimer and atomic espionage at Los alamos and the Rad Lab at UCal Berkeley.

During our conversation you mentioned that you studied at Cornell when Hans Bethe was there, etc. I have since spoken with Stephen Schwartz and he mentioned that you knew Dr. Philip Morrison at MIT or possibly knew how to approach him.

The reason I am sending you this e-mail is because recent information has surfaced from Soviet archives that strongly suggests that Morrison may know more about atomic espionage at Los Alamos than he has revealed. I have spoken with agents of the FBI, experts on American Communism at the Library of Congress, people close to Pavel Sudoplatov, and other sources, and they all say the same thing aboout Morrison. There is more to the story here but I do not want to mention it over the e-mail.

As you may know, the Harvard physicist Theodore Alvin Hall, still alive and living in England, worked at Los Alamos. He and his Harvard classmate Saville Sax (deceased) have been publicly identified as atomic spies who passed top-secret data to the KGB.

I wanted to talk with you about possibly interviewing Philip Morrison, or see if you would be interested in asking him some questions for me about Oppenheimer, Los Alamos, etc. I donšt know how receptive Morrison would be to an interview. He refused all interview-requests by the FBI in the past. But Morrison did belong to the Communist Party, as he testified. And maybe today, with communism collapsed and the geopolitical scene altered, Morrison might want to talk about the past.

If you are interested in setting up an interview with Morrison or possibly fielding him some questions, please let me know. I can be reached at e-mail: ........ My phone number is 703-.......

I mentioned the above information about Morrison to Stephen Schwartz about a month ago and he suggested that I contact you.

Thank you for your time and effort.

Sincerely,

M...... C..............

Alexandria, Va

Leaving the politics, and back to the physics of consciousness:

JS: You put a lot of emphasis on the "quantum oscillation" and how MAPs "tune them" AS IF quantum oscillations were just like classical waves confined to physical space.

SH: The MAPs are "environment" which, if interactive with a quantum system, will cause collapse. The MT lattice sites at which MAPs attach are thus "forbidden" from quantum oscillations.

So they are nodes. But still you are not getting my point about the difference between the Frohlich "classical oscillation" of electric dipoles and the attached "quantum oscillation" that I call the "pilot wave". The classical oscillation is the material "hidden variable" that is not included in Bohr's Copenhagen interpretation, yet your idea of MAPS as nodes has to refer to it not the quantum oscillation. Let's be specific. Suppose you have N MT's on a "line" between two nodal MAPS. The classical electric-dipole oscillation will be E(xi,t), where i = 1, 2, ... N. The two nodal MAPS are located at i = 0 and i = N+1, with your nodal boundary condition that we cannot yet define. We must define E(xi). E refers to the possible classical positions of the key single electron at the alpha-beta hydrophobic cage, that you describe, which determine the classical conformation of the protein dimer. Therefore, it is a "bit" variable that we can assign the values "0" or "1" as in a computer or a Turing machine. The important point of this "toy model" (a standard technique of theoretical physics) is that the classical oscillation, that is subject to the nodal MAPS, is a function in ordinary physical space. That is, E depends only on ONE xi at a time.

Now in Bohm's pilot-wave theory, there is a "quantum oscillation" Psi ATTACHED to the "classical" Frohlich electric dipole oscillation E(xi,t). As Henry Stapp clearly pointed out in the post you cited, psi is LOCAL in configuration space, but it is NONLOCAL in its effects ON objects INSIDE classical spacetime geometry. Psi is not a structure IN the classical spacetime geometry. Now I know you use "fundamental spacetime geometry" and I am not sure what it means, but I do know what "classical spacetime geometry" (CST) means, and the aim of the game here is to be as precise and unambiguous as possible. So, the NONLOCAL PILOT-WAVE here is:

Psi = Psi(E(x1, ... E(xN),t)

where P = [E(x1, ... E(xN)]

is a "point" in N-dimensional "classical configuration space" (CCS) of BIT-STRINGS. Every CLASSICAL bit-string of SPATIALLY-ENCODED INFORMATION is a "classical field configuration" P in Bohm's pilot-wave version of quantum field theory. Furthermore, the actual points in physical 3D space are "parameters" here. Note, that the Psi-FUNCTIONAL is obviously a NONLOCAL structure. The quantum force on the classical Frohlich electric-dipole oscillation P is the "functional gradient" of the "super quantum potential" computed from the above Psi. Background details are in Chapter 11 (no pun here please! :-)),i.e., "The ontological interpretation of boson fields" of Bohm and Hiley's, The Undivided Universe, especially: pp.236 (eq.11.20), 240 (eq. 11.28 etc), 241 (eqs. 11.32 - 36), 242.

Now, in my theory, Psi is the "mind" attached to the classical bit strings of dynamic spatially-encoded information in the "pumped" Frohlich electric dipole oscillations caused by a combination of of nerve impulses and molecular signals etc. Therefore, the action of "mind" on its attached material brain substrate P is the above quantum force. This is the quantum mechanism of "intent". So far, there is no back-action in this toy-model, so there is no way that the brain-substrate P can literally change it's mind. We can recast this discussion in terms of the system point P moving under the combined action of the classical and quantum forces in a thought-like "fitness landscape" the way it is done in Stu Kaufmann's book, The Origins of Order, Ch 5. When we add, the back-action beyond orthodox quantum theory, the fitness landscape changes according to the actual motion of the system point P of the classical Frohlich mode. It is then a C*-fitness landscape (C*FL), where C* means "sentience". My C* includes "subconscious" (S) as well as your conscious (C). So, C* = [S,C]. "Bifurcations" in C*FL correspond to the creation of new ideas etc. "Orchestrated self-collapse" is simply the globally self-consistent co-evolving transient capture of the system point P in a particular (usually "fractal") "basin of attraction" of the C-fitness landscape. This metastable capture is a transient fully subjective quale in my theory as a POSTULATE. Your theory, and every physical theory of C* needs such a postulate somewhere. This is in accord with Chalmer's ideas on the subject. My "capture" of P on a strange attractor in C*FL matches exactly your "quale as self-collapse" idea but in a much more detailed way.

The "orchestration" or self-organizing aspect is much clearer in my model than in yours because of the feedback-control loop between P and C*FL provided by BOTH the ordinary Bohm quantum force of C*FL (mind) on P (brain matter substrate), and the back-action of P on C*FL forming a sentient complex adaptive system in which "inanimate" uncontrollable quantum randomness is quieted down. All of this, of course, requires protection or "thermal-screening" from the random noise of the hot wet environment.

Now you say that CCS, as well as "Hilbert space" (HS), are not "real" or at least do not have the same degree of realness as does "fundamental spacetime geometry" (FST) which you do not ever precisely define. Well, your FST certainly must consist of CST, CCS and HS and possibly other structures based upon the little information you did give on the meeting honoring Penrose's 65th Birthday. I think your attitude here is a classic "failure of nerve" to take the mathematics seriously in Steven Weinberg's sense (i.e., Dreams of a Final Theory). You draw the line arbitrarily like the "Von Neumann cut" of the Copenhagen interpretation. But this lacks logic and intuitive force. But what can be said with mathematical exactness, is that Psi stands OUTSIDE of CST. Psi is a complex-valued FUNCTIONAL whose range is the complex plane, and whose domain is the CCS of classical bit strings. It is also a "point" in a Hilbert space (HS) of such possible pilot-waves or NONLOCAL quantum oscillations.

If we can define a Bose-Einstein condensate in this situation to get an "order parameter" O(x), that could be your "quantum oscillation" such that O(x0) = O(xN+1) = 0, at the nodal MAPS. But this will take a lot of mathematical work to see if it can be done properly. As I remember Frohlich's calculations, while highly suggestive, do not go far enough and do not use the full quantum theory as I outlined above. Apparently, everyone else, since him, has prematurely gone off half-cocked on this, using cheap words not backed up by real theoretical models -- even though it may be a correct idea in the end. It looks like we have a lot of precognitive remote-viewing gong on here about what the future theory is going to look like.

SH:Thus the MAPs (and other biological factors) define *a priori* the possibilities and probabilities for quantum oscillations for each Orch OR cycle.

Maybe so, but I do not understand this in enough detail to be comfortable with it. I suspect you do not either nor does anyone else. What you are doing here really is "precognitive remote viewing". You are giving a research program, a wish list. I do not think Penrose has any detailed math to back it up as yet. Prove me wrong! :-) First thing, is give the mathematical definition for "quantum oscillation". What is oscillating?

SH: Only certain patterns of MTsubunits are available for quantum coherence via the Frohlich pumping mechanism.

Maybe so, but prove it in detail, or, at least, give some sort of "toy model". Which "patterns of MT" etc?

SH: We're *not* saying the MAPs interact in/with the quantum oscillations; they merely set the stage (and provide the key biological feedback).

Suggestive, but what do you mean? Your meaning is not clear-- to me, to anyone else, and probably not even to you! :-) What do you mean by "biological feedback" in this context?

SH: Look at Figure 37.8 in Hameroff and Penrose, 1996 (Incidentally, the full Orch OR paper is now published in Mathematics and Computers in Simulation 40:453-480, 1996).

Isn't this basically what you handed out at Tucson II? If so, it is far from adequate in answering the questions I am raising. Penrose has the mathematical power to do this, but so far he has only given very simple, uncompelling, heuristic arguments. This is OK, but what Nanopoulos is angry about is that you present it as more than it really is so far, and do not give reference to his much more detailed computations on relevant issues here.

JS: As Stapp clearly pointed out..., quantum oscillations are local in configuration space (which you think is not "real") and they are nonlocal in terms of physical space. So, perhaps, this is what you mean by nonlocality "in" spacetime?

SH: Penrose says spacetime is intrinsically non-local.

Well, why don't you get him to write something for you on what he really means by that remark, the way Stapp wrote a note to me etc. When he says "nonlocal" he means, I bet, FST including CST, CCS and HS at least.

JS: On the other hand, the Frohlich electric dipole oscillations can be viewed as a classical oscillation in physical space with a quantum "pilot-wave" oscillation in configuration space attached to it. I do not think you are aware of this distinction which is a basic part of Bohm's theory.

SH: They "can" be viewed that way; they can also be viewed as quantum coherent excitations.

Yes, but you must give a mathematical formula for what you mean by "quantum coherent excitations" as I have begun to do above.

SH: Orch OR doesn't subscribe to Bohm's theory; it subscribes to Penrose's theory of objective reduction (see Penrose 1996 for the mathematics you've been demanding).

JS: The Frohlich oscillation is not the same as the "quantum oscillation".

SH: In Orch OR the Frohlich oscillations in MTs may be either classical or quantum, and in fact pass between the two phases. See Figure 10 in Hameroff and Penrose, 1996.

I really don't know what you mean. What Bohm means is that -gradQ is small compared to -gradV (or their super-equivalents for fields rather than particles).

JS: The Frohlich oscillation is "material" hidden variable, while the "quantum oscillation" is "mental" in my back-action theory.

SH: So you are a dualist?

Jeez! Stu, wake up and smell the coffee. I have consistently said I am a "physical" dualist, not a "Cartesian dualist", over and over and over again, like the Bunny that just keeps going, going and going. :-)

That is, mind is not supernatural as in Cartesian dualism, but is physical as in Bohm's ontological pilot wave. The hidden-variable is the "matter", the pilot-wave is the "mind-stuff" which is not C*, but is only S until thermal-screening allows back-action to self-organize and wake up the system into C by generating the stream of qualia.

SH: How are the two connected?

Again for the umpteenth time: Mind (Q-pilot-wave wave Psi) ACTS ON its attached "hidden variable" brain matter substrate (P) with the well known NONLOCAL and CONTEXT-DEPENDENT quantum force of Bohm's theory which is minus the (super) gradient of the (super) quantum potential of the classical Frohlich mode of MTs. See Ch 11 of The Undivided Universe. So far, this is orthodox quantum theory of modern physics.

Step 2. We now must Godel jump beyond orthodox quantum theory to the post-modern physics of "back-action". The back-action is the actual motion of the hidden-variable P in CCS back on Psi. The QUALIA are the consequent self-organized CHANGES in Psi from the actual path of P. Bohm's theory is a theory of INDIVIDUAL quantum systems the way Bohr's is not. There is no statistics here.

SH: Is mental continuous?

What do you mean? Psi is a continuous function. Qualia are transient excitations in Psi imprinted by the back-action from the motion of P in CCS.

SH: If this is Hilbert space,

Psi is a moving point in Hilbert space, yes. We have a moving point P of the brain matter substrate (e.g. Frohlich mode) in classical configuration space CCS. Psi is exerting a force -supergrad (super Q) on P. Indeed, a coherent decomposition of Psi into eigenfunctions of the "fitness" (observable) gives a "fitness landscape" for P to roll around in. But the back-action is exerting a reaction force on Psi's path in Hilbert space HS. So we have TWO self-consistently coupled motions of "mental" Psi in HS AND "matter" P in CCS. The temporary meta-stable capture of P by a fractal strange attractor in CCS is your "Orch OR", which is the generation of a "quale" in both our models. The two-way coupling combination of quantum force with back-action provides the feedback-control loop for self-organization which you call "orchestration", in which quantum randomness is suppressed at the higher levels of function of living matter.

SH ... why/how do we arrive at unitary decisions?

If you have followed me above, this should, by now, be transparently obvious. If you mean the "binding problem" by "unitary", the NONLOCALITY and CONTEXT- DEPENDENCE of the quantum force of mind on its brain substrate is the answer. If you look at the simple math above, you will see that Psi acts on every spatially separated piece of the Frohlich mode E(xi). The context-dependence is that the quantum force depends upon which point in HS is acting. That is, HS is a functional space in which different "points" are different possible Psi functionals. So we arrive at unitary decisions because of the globally self-consistent CO-EVOLUTION of the path of the mental psi-point in Hilbert space with the path of the hidden-variable brain matter substrate system point P on a fitness landscape in classical configuration space. The fitness landscape is co-determined by both mental and classical gauge forces -- the latter from the external environment (e.g., the near EM fields of the classical nerve impulses).

SH: In Orch OR this is a natural consequence.

It is? How? I have yet to see any precise mathematical definition of orch OR that one can bite one's teeth on. It is like some airy dream. Perhaps Penrose's new paper will make me change my mind.

JS: To be more precise about the "quantum oscillation" for the microtubules, its functional domain is classical configuration space which you say does not exist. Its functional range is the complex plane of Hilbert space which you also say does not exist with the same reality that spacetime has.

SH: Abstract mathematical spaces are just that: abstract. They are useful, but not necessarily real in the sense that spacetime is real.

This is really amateurish nonsense that no theoretical physicist will accept. Spacetime is a very complicated abstract mathematical space. I can't believe that Penrose will back you up on that.

JS: You display here what Steven Weinberg, in Dreams of a Final Theory, describes as a "failure of nerve" in the power of the mathematics to describe the physical world.

SH: What I'm displaying is merely a disagreement with you. Mathematics can indeed describe the world - but mathematics is not the world (although Penrose's Platonism suggests it is part of the world).

My position on this does not entail that mathematics is all of the world. It does entail that all of the world can be mapped by mathematics - computer multimedia and virtual reality are proof of that. What we are trying to do is to make mathematical maps of qualia and their connections to living matter. You speak of qualia as the "orchestrated collapse" of a quantum oscillation or some macroscopic wave function which is some pattern in some "fundamental spacetime" and you APPEAR to be really clueless here about what you really mean by these abstract terms. You have failed to give clear working definitions of what you mean by your key terms "spacetime", "quantum oscillation" and "OR", for example. What is the mathematical criterion for when the Frohlich oscillation has a phase transition between "classical" and "quantum"?

JS: To be even more precise, the dimension of the classical configuration space for the Frohlich oscillation is essentially 3N where N is the number electrons in the alpha-beta "hydrophobic space" of each dimer that you have described for us.

SH: In all seriousness I'd like to know why this is useful.

This should be clear by now. Essentially, because this Bohmian formulation of the physics of quantum measurement theory connects seamlessly to the mathematics of complex adaptive systems in biology and ecology. Your Bohr-based theory cannot do this in principle because it throws the matter baby out (as a hidden variable) with the bath water. Traditional quantum mechanics ala Bohr never makes clear the precise connection between Hilbert space and classical mechanics in phase space. Only Bohm's theory can do this. All the big physics professors are unclear about it except the ones who understand Bohm, like Basil Hiley and Peter Holland.

SH: But you're missing something very important. It's the superposition of the entire protein - not just the electrons (although they may be the initiating factor - and they're more complicated than a two state switch).

Since there is a perfect correlation between the electron and the conformation of the dimer, your above point is not correct. It is enough to consider only the electrons since they drag the dimer conformation along with it. It's like the two strands in the double-helix. One strand is enough for the code. Also, I am only giving a "toy-model" focussing on the "electrons" for simplicity to show the main qualitative considerations. I never said it is the complete and final solution. It can be generalized to include the entire protein and the chain of proteins. No matter what your model, there is a CCS and a HS for it. My above argument is very general and is largely model-independent in your sense.

Also do you know the math of what you are saying here? Let |0) and |1) be the two possible states for the electron in the dimer. Let |+) and |-) be the two possible states for the conformation of the dimer as a whole. Then, what you are apparently saying is that we have and entangled state of the form |0)|-) + |1)|+) for a single dimer. Now we really have a long chain of them. But my above formalism is general enough to handle it.

SH: It's the mass separation from the superposition of the many tubulin proteins which reach the critical threshold for collapse in neurophysiologically relevant times (e.g. nanograms for a 500 msec Orch OR).

What does "superposition of many tubulin proteins" really mean here? Let's do a simple problem with only TWO tubulin proteins. We have |0)|0) or |0)|1) or |1)|0) or |1)|1). So your superposition in this case is

and I do mean my Psi as defined above. Now in orthodox quantum theory in the Bohr Copenhagen paradigm (which is the ZERO back-action limit of my theory). There is only traditional "uncontrollable" or "un-orchestrated" quantum randomness defined by the Born probability interpretation in which

|z00|^2 = probability for an ordinary "R-collapse" of Psi into |0)|0) in Penrose's sense. Similarly, for the three other states. So, now I ask, given your "orch OR", how do you define the "mass separation" &M? How do the coefficients z depend on &M? Do all the probabilities still add to 1? It's not clear they should because we have an open dissipative system. Bifurcations of the basins of attraction in classical configuration space correspond to creation and destruction of eigenfunctions of the observable "fitness".

SH: If only the electrons were coherent, collapse (Orch OR) wouldn't be reached for a very, very long time.

Yes, this is true. The coherence time varies as the inverse sixth power of the mass in the Nanopoulos calculation. That's why I associate electrons with our long-term memory which gives us our sense of being the same person. The short-term memory of qualia is done by proton clumps like proteins I agree. The electrons in the hydrophobic cages drag the massive dimer with them so they are short term memory or qualia, but there must be other protected electrons that are responsible for long term memory and our sense of a continuing "self".

SH: This is why quantum computers won't be conscious.

You just made an illogical leap to a false conclusion. Also you contradict yourself since you say qualia are Orch OR's of a macro-quantum oscillation of some kind. The OR is the "halting" of the quantum computer which is the meta-stable capture of material P by a mental quantum fractal strange attractor in CCS on the fitness landscape.

Furthermore, it is the thermal-screening out of the hot wet irrelevant part of the brain matter which gives the electrons enough time to quantum compute in their protected hydrophobic cages (Prospero's Cell! :-)).

SH: Conformational responsiveness is a key biological feature of proteins.

Yes, and nothing I say contradicts that.

SH: However in your (Bohm) model that doesn't appear to matter because there is no collapse. We believe the (self-)collapse is the essential point - - you say you can "simulate" the collapse, that it doesn't really occur (I assume you mean you can explain what you consider the illusion of collapse).

Yes, again for the umpteenth time, what you call "orchestrated collapse" is the metastable or transient capture of the brain substrate system point P in CCS by the fractal strange attractor in the fitness landscape. The motion of P in CCS and the motion of Psi in HS are co-evolving or co-determing each other because of the combination of the quantum force with the back-action into a self-organizing or "orchestrated" feedback-control loop between mind and matter. The advantage of this Bohmian picture is that it fits exactly into the adaptive systems paradigm of the Santa Fe Institute on Complexity.

SH: In Penrose's OR, the collapse is taken seriously, as an actual event.

So what? That's not important in the final analysis.

SH: And since it is really a re-configuration of fundamental spacetime (in which we assume experience resides),

You have not defined "fundamental spacetime" but it must include my classical configuration space and my Hilbert space. Right now you use FST as some vague catch-all buzzword. Give a precise definition as I have done for all the terms I use.

SH: conscious experience results.

Yes, but you don't recognize that that is a POSTULATE of your theory -- as it is in mine. I am pretty sure at this point that I have given a new level of detail to your nice "Dream of a Physics of Consciousness" which makes a direct connection to the MATHEMATICAL theory of self-organization of complex adaptive systems which you do not have.

SH: Your model remains uncollapsed in what we view as the pre-conscious, or sub-conscious.

Bull Tweedle! :-) You still don't understand what I am saying. The "preconscious" is what Penrose calls the R of ordinary "unorchestrated" quantum mechanics. The "conscious" my C* including ordinary waking consciousness C and subconscious processing S needs the back-action in which capture of material P in a mental basin of attraction is your Orch OR exactly! It is the "halting" of the quantum computation exactly!

SH: Consciousness is never realized.

"Dry up, and blow away!" :-) It's your understanding of what I am actually saying which is not yet realized. The system point P in your brain has not yet been captured into to the quantum mental basin of attraction on the fitness landscape of this communication link whose quale will be your "Great Aha!" of "Oh, now I grok what Sarfatti means!".

By the way, since quantum computation with back-action involves the "precognition" of Ed May's et-al "DAT" model, it gives a detailed meaning to Penrose's "nonalgorithmic" nature of "understanding". A classical algorithm is a retarded process proceeding in only one direction in time from past to future. The "nonalgorithmic" part is the advanced influence from future to past. In the presence of back-action there is actual precognition or DAT which there is not in ordinary quantum mechanics. So Orch OR and DAT are closely linked.

SH: This is why I kiddingly characterized you as the guy who could never get off the subway - doomed > to ride around forever like the character in a song from long ago. Yeah! You left the Shaman sleeping in the subway, like Morgana La Fey left me long ago imprisoned in my Cage of Ice under the Lake along with Excalibur and the Spear of Destiny! Well the Ice has cracked, and I AM BACK with The Sword and The Spear! Deep Pockets Chakra has plagarized my story from the 1980's! :-)

SH: (In response to Rick Prescott): How can C be shown (only or otherwise) to exist in anything? Can you prove that I am conscious? Does "meaning for humans" prove only humans can be conscious?

JS: Prescott's argument is wrong because of his elementary confusion that "complex" means "non-quantum". But your above argument weakens your own theory that qualia are orchestrated self-collapses of a macroscopic wave function which clearly has to be fundamentally "mental" or "sentient" for your theory to make any sense at all. If one can detect the wave function then one has detected C. What could be simpler? The point is, if C has any physical basis, which your own theory posits, a C-detector is possible in principle. SH: First, Orch OR is not the wave function. It is a self-collapse event of the wave function.

That's what I said, Bubba! My exact words are "qualia are orchestrated self-collapses of a macroscopic wave function". This is good English that does not mean Orch OR IS the wave function.

SH: The wave function per se relates to pre-conscious and sub-conscious processing - a subtle but crucial connection made by Penrose.

I say the same thing. If the back-action is negligible, the evolution of Psi is a pre-conscious process. Back-action wakes Psi into C*.

SH: If you could directly "detect it", it would collapse by environmental interaction in a computable, non-Orch OR, non-conscious way.

Not necessarily, read Aharonov's new stuff. There are new classes of "weak" and "protected" measurements not dream't of in your "Orch OR" philosophy! :-)

JS: My theory is a more detailed explanation of your theory that makes an explicit connection of the quantum to complexity and adaptive systems in the sense of the paradigm of the Santa Fe Institute.

SH: But your Bohmian explanation destroys an essential physical point -- the quantum gravity self-collapse.

No it does not. It's there in the Nanopoulos computation of the dissipative term in the density matrix equation. Pages 345-6 of The Undivided Universe shows the MATHEMATICAL link from back-action to the Nanopoulos "brains with superstring" model which has the quantum gravity the Penrose invokes.

SH: Also, you don't involve the biology at all -- except mentioning bits and pieces we've said. And as far as connecting MT dynamics to Santa Fe complexity - read Hameroff et al, 1989 and Rasmussen et al, 1990. The Kaufmann fitness landscapes you mention (presumably to derive some form of stable neural network patterns) could work, as could Edelman's "neural Darwinism" and many, many other network models. Good luck.

No, no you did not then see the EXACT MATHEMATICS of the connection from Orch OR to complexity fitness landscapes that I have outlined above. Do you? If so, show me!

Stuart Hameroff

srh@ccit.arizona.edu

Hameroff, S.R., and Penrose, R., (1996a) Orchestrated reduction of quantum coherence in brain microtubules: A model for consciousness. In: Toward a Science of Consciousness - The First Tucson Discussions and Debates, S.R. Hameroff, A. Kaszniak and A.C. Scott (eds.), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.pp 507-540

Hameroff and Penrose (1996b) Conscious events as orchestrated spacetime selections. Journal of Consciousness Studies 3(1):36-53

Penrose, R. (1994) Shadows of the Mind, Oxford Press, Oxford, U.K.

Penrose, R. (1989) The Emperor's New Mind, Oxford Press, Oxford, U.K.

Penrose, R., Hameroff, S.R., What gaps? Reply to Grush and Churchland. Journal of Consciousness Studies 2(2): 99-112.

Penrose, R. (1996) On gravity's role in quantum state reduction. General relativity and gravitation. 28(5): 581-600

Rasmussen, S., Karampurwala, H., Vaidyanath, R., Jensen, K.S., and Hameroff, S. (1990) Computational connectionism within neurons: A model of cytoskeletal automata subserving neural networks. Physica D 42:428-449.

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