Stuart Hameroff on July 11, 1996 wrote:

Subject:

Orch OR fights back!

From Stuart Hameroff (SH): I've been away for a month and have just caught up on JCS-OnLine. I'm somewhat amused that Jack Sarfatti (JS) has turned his Bohmian imitation of our Orch OR model into a cottage industry. I really wouldn't mind if Jack were improving and clarifying Orch OR, but in attempting to put his "back action" stamp on it he's discarding essential points.

Sarfatti (JS): Please enumerate which essential points I have discarded in precise detail? I am not aware of them.

JS: ...there is no justification for identifying any purely spacetime pattern with a conscious experience.

SH: There is no obvious justification for us being conscious. Nonetheless, we are.

JS: Exactly, and I have simply pointed out that there exists a well known nonlocal context-dependent structure in nonrelativistic quantum mechanics which fits all the requirements for a field of sentience or qualia (that Libet called for at Tucson II) once back-action is included. Not only that, but it fully accounts for all the essential features of OR unless you can explicitly demonstrate otherwise.

SH: To address the "hard problem"

JS: Which I say is a "pseudo-problem", but not for the same reasons Dennett et-al may say so.

SH: and other tricky issues a Whiteheadian/panpsychist view is needed to supplement reductionist neuroscience.

JS: Well we do not disagree here since my hypothesis, i.e., that the Bohm pilot-wave, when thermally-screened from interactive decoherence, is sentient by virtue of the intrinsic back-action "superstring" dissipation of the universe discovered by Nanopoulos et-al, fully simulates your "Whiteheadean/ panpsychist view" in spades.

SH: The modern physics context of a Whiteheadian/panpsychist view is spacetime geometry.

JS: There seems to be a large logical gap or leap of faith here. I really do not know why you say this. I suspect I am not alone in this puzzlement. Can you connect the dots a bit more?

SH: - the fundamental level of reality.

JS: This seems to oppose Penrose's view. All physicists now assume that classical spacetime is a low-energy limit to a deeper theory whether it be superstrings, or "pregeometry", or "quantum gravity foam". What exactly do you mean by "spacetime"? If you include the quantum gravity foam, then you are also automatically including the Bohm pilot-waves whether you realize it or not at the present time.

Even in nonrelativistic quantum mechanics (certainly sufficient for quantum biology which is what we are doing here) you have a Hilbert space of quantum wavefunctions which have equal ontological status to spacetime geometry in Bohm's theory, and, which, as Stapp made clear at Tucson II, are fundamentally linked to consciousness in the epistemological Bohr/Whiteheadian metaphysics.

SH: We're claiming they are related - that there exists a connection between the philosophical (e.g. Chalmers, Whitehead) and the physics (e.g. Einstein, Penrose).

JS: Well I say they are "related" because the changes in configuration of the brain substrate (probably microtubules) will of course alter the spacetime geometry a tiny amount.

SH: How very imaginative of you (see Hameroff and Penrose, 1996b).

My point here is that any description based on Bohr's Copenhagen interpretation is fundamentally incomplete and ambiguous because it asserts that one cannot visualize motions of individual quantum systems the way we can in classical physics. In fact, Bohm in 1952 showed that to be untrue and even the late John Bell admitted that Bohm's theory is superior or preferable to Bohr's. Note, I am not talking about Bohm's later "implicate order" of the 1970's which was IMHO a devolution to an even vaguer state of mind than Bohr's. What is truly "imaginative" in my theory, is the mathematical connection of the back-action extension of Bohm's theory to the "fitness landscape" picture of complex adaptive systems as described in detail in Stuart Kauffman's book, The Origins of Order (Oxford) especially Ch 5 "Self-Organization and Adaptation in Complex Systems". It is the back-action that enables the mind-pilot wave to adapt to changing signals from its attached material brain substrate (the microtubules). This dynamic adaptive pattern is the stream of qualia. The so-called "hard problem" is solved in principle by this.

The mind acts on its brain through the, by now well understood, quantum force equal to the negative gradient of the quantum potential. Now in fact, L. Crowell (lcrowell@unm.edu) a physics graduate student at the University of New Mexico working with me by email, has recently shown, in only the past few weeks, that the Bohm quantum potential Q does indeed distort the local classical metric, surrounding the hidden-variable particle surfing its attached quantum wave, giving a new sort of "hidden time". Therefore, we actually have what might turn out to be a specific mathematical bridge to your vague, hitherto purely verbal, ideas on spacetime geometry and consciousness. I have not seen any such specific math coming from Penrose on this point. The stuff in your handouts at Tucson II does not really address this issue in detail the way Crowell did, but sort of takes it for granted.

JS:...Besides Whitehead is really irrelevant since quantum mechanics was not sufficiently worked out when he was thinking.

SH: Whitehead described his fundamental "occasions of experience" which, in retrospect (as pointed out by Abner Shimony, 1993) fit very closely with quantum events. That's the beauty of it. It was intuitive (or perhaps pre-cognitive, if one believes that is possible).

JS:... but the much larger more relevant alteration which produces qualia is the corresponding change in the thought-like pilot wave attached to that brain substrate.

SH: Just because you name it "thought-like" doesn't mean that it *is* thought-like (or that it exists).

This is "Pot calling Kettle black", because you need to make essentially the same axiom when you assert that qualia are the self-collapses of "OR". Yes, it is so by axiomatic hypothesis, and from it I get more with less -- I mean a lot more. A lot of interesting testable connections fall out. It is the simplest hypothesis to make especially because of the tight mathematical bridge to the content of Kauffman's book on complex adaptive systems which you are not aware of yet. That's my ace in the whole (pun intended) which leaves all the rest of you guys in the dust. :-) Also you are contradicting yourself since you associate qualia with an "orchestrated gravitational self-collapse" of a giant quantum state. The pilot wave is that very giant quantum state that you speak of. The difference is that there is no literal collapse, but we can simulate your collapse and explain why your vaguer theory makes you think it is a literal collapse. Indeed Bohm did just that in 1952.

SH: If I understand you, the pilot wave is the coherent wave function

JS: Yes.

SH: which, in your scenario, doesn't collapse.

JS: It's not my scenario, but Bohm's scenario. Bohm's theory has no collapse in it ever. But it can fully simulate all the pragmatic features of Bohr's collapse in a visualizable way. Bohm's theory supercedes Bohr's. Bohm gives us "collapse without collapse". What is really happening is that the brain material is represented as a "system point" in the "phase space" (more accurately "configuration space" in the quantum case is sufficient) of classical nonlinear mechanics. The latter describes "complexity" as the "on the edge" between "order" and "chaos". The background is in Kauffman's book, The Origins of Order. Now when we want to measure an "observable" property in Bohr's sense, that observable selects out a "fitness landscape" which is a hilly corrugated hypersurface in configuration space (3N dimensions for N point particles, phase space has 6N). The brain material substrate "system point" is like a ball rolling on this hilly corrugated surface. The "eigenfunctions" of the quantum observable that defines "fitness", form the metastable valleys or "basins of attraction" that the ball can roll into. When the ball is captured in a particular valley, we have "collapse without collapse". Now this is the beginning of a very pretty and compelling picture that no Yankee Engineer cannot immediately fall in love with. No more of that Hegelian Laputan Metaphysical Mumbo Jumbo jargon that Bohr and all his desciples, including you, Penrose and Stapp, use! :-)

Here-now is where my axiomatic hypothesis comes into play. The big idea of my Great Aha! is that the fitness landscape of Stu Kaufmann is an internal representation or mental pattern. You see this fitness landscape is in fact determined by Bohm's quantum potential Q together with any classical gauge forces that are acting in the brain. Now in ordinary quantum mechanics the material ball rolls about under the action of the gradient vector field determined by the fitness landscape, but that fitness landscape remains fixed unaffected by the actual path of the ball (i.e., the brain material substrate system point) which is the "hidden-variable" absent in Bohr's Copenhagen theory. Bohr throws the brain away altogether! That the fitness landscape is fixed in ordinary quantum mechanics is a rigorous theorem proved by Bohm in 1952. When I say "fixed", I mean, for rigid boundary conditions, and when we subtract out the ordinary unitary time evolution which is independent of the actual path of the hidden variable. This is the sort of thing that is routinely done in the "interaction picture" of quantum field theory. Note, if we take the boundary conditions slowly through a closed cycle we get the new topological "Berry phase" which is also very interesting for our problem. Therefore, it follows, that if the fitness landscape is an internal representation of the Libetian or Ecclessian "mind-field", then this system is not an adaptive system because the mind-field cannot learn or adapt from the experience which is encoded in the Feynman history of the actual path that the ball took in this approximation. Bohr's metaphysics does not allow for such a visualizable picture -- Bohm's does! Get it yet? NO? I didn't really expect you would! Then, let me continue. :-)

Now the Prima Donna named back-action makes her Grand Entrance on to my Neo-Cartesian Quantum Mystery Science Theater.:-) It is the back-action which allows the actual motion of the brain system point (rolling ball) through the fitness landscape to change the global shape of that very same fitness landscape! Back-action, therefore is intrinsically self-referential in Doug Hofstadter's sense of the "strange-loopiness" of Godel's incompleteness theorem (e.g., Godel,Escher,Bach). This change, of the "mental" fitness landscape by the actual motion of the brain material system point, from back-action is identical to the shifting stream of qualia in this new theory of mine. This identity is an axiom which can be compared to Einstein's axiom that the speed of light in vacuum is the same for all inertial observers. So classical mechanics can't explain consciousness. So orthodox quantum mechanics can't explain consciousness, but this slight extension of quantum mechanics called back-action instantly explains consciousness. That is, it explains exactly how we get complex adaptive systems that learn from experience in which the "mental" fitness landscape is a faithful homomorphic map of the nonlocal context-dependent quantum mind that not only acts on its attached material brain, but is acted upon by its brain material. Therefore, we now have a quantum cybernetic feed-back control loop of self-organization sitting on the cutting edge between order and chaos whose classical limit is explained in detail by Stu Kauffman in The Origins of Order.

SH: We'd say that's pre-conscious, sub-conscious, or in your case, dreaming.

JS: In my case "dreaming"? In your case what? Nasty, nasty Stu. That's not nice. :-) Well I forgive you since I have obviously put you on the defensive in public with my detailed sharp-minded critique of the ambiguities and unclear parts of your presentation which have large gaps of logic in them though you are fundamentally on the right track. Interestingly enough, Dimitri Nanopoulos has made the same kind of critique of your ideas here, quite independently, as you now are aware.

I would say that ordinary quantum mechanics is the physics of the "pre-conscious" because there is no flow of information from the material motion of the body to the mind. Back-action is required for the brain to be able to change its mind. That time sequence of changes is the source of the stream of qualia.

SH: But without self-collapse (OR), neither conscious thought, space-time selection, nor neural action can occur.

I can more clearly explain the Bohr/Von Neumann et-al illusion of collapse as the more detailed Bohmian "collapse without collapse". It is the self-organization of the back-action and its consequent cybernetic feedback-control loop that provides your much sought after "orchestration" of the "objective reduction". Indeed, Nanopoulos traces this back-action "quantum friction" to superstrings in the quantum gravity foam. So, I can prove it in more visualizable detail. You simply assert it without any explanation at all! Self-collapse is simply the capture of the brain matter system point by a mental basin of attraction on the fitness landscape in which the shape of the basin is being changed by the actual motion of the brain system point in an obviously self-organizing way because of the feedback-control loop made possible by back-action. We can, therefore, have bifurcations or phase transitions leading to the birth of emergent unexpected behavior. So my theory explains what your theory simply posits, and I get a lot more out that your theory cannot even formulate because of the false constraints put on it by Bohr's irrational mysticism that he inherited from Hegel.

SH: In consciousness theory terms, you're like the guy who lacks a token and can never get off the subway.

JS: It is the back-action that permits the transfer of sensory data into qualia.

SH: No, it's the receptors, microtubules and microtubule-associated- proteins (MAPs). The feed-back ("orchestration") is the biology (e.g. the MAPs) tuning the quantum oscillations.The post-reduction tubulin states then manage the biology.

JS: This is very unclear to me as to what you mean. I suspect no one else understands what you mean here either. If any one understands the above remark, please enter the conversation and explain it.

Of course, microtubules, MAPS are all encoded in the construction of the configuration space that the brain system point moves in. The system point is the representation of the microtubule/MAP/Frohlich mode collective motions. What precisely do you mean by "quantum oscillation"? I suspect you mean the Frohlich modes. But you do not clearly distinguish between the collective motion of the electric dipoles in physical space (which becomes a system point in configuration space) from the evolution of their attached quantum wave in Hilbert space (which translates into the shape of the fitness landscape hypersurface in configuration space).

*Note - the fitness landscape will change in time due to the ordinary unitary evolution of the wave function in time, but back-action is a new sort of nonunitary change or "friction" on top of that which depends on the actual motion of the hidden-variable system point.

Also what precisely do you mean by "manage the biology"? Your above remark is much too cryptic and vague to settle the complex issue at hand.

JS: But it appears you are making a stronger claim than mere relatedness. You are saying that the qualia ARE these spacetime patterns.

SH: Yes. As I said earlier, Chalmers' fundamental experience (qualia) is a noun; Whitehead's fundamental experience is a verb. A conscious event "experiences" experience...or, (using Whitehead's term) a conscious event "prehends" experience.

JS: This part seems to be merely a word game that is not very important. Chalmer's criterion is ambiguous. My identification of the pilot-wave as the fundamental sentient structure in the universe (if back-action is not over-ridden by interactive decoherence) also satisfies Chalmer's criterion in a much more precise testable way.

SH: Consciousness is a process of events occurring in a medium of fundamental experience.

JS: Good, I understand this sentence. Your "medium of fundamental experience" is my "pilot-wave" or its associated "fitness landscape". Technically, the fitness landscape is a coherent decomposition of the total pilot wave into a complete set of eigenfunctions of the set of commuting observables that define the "fitness" -- this is what Bohr described as the "total experimental arrangement". For example, if we put a diffraction grating into a beam of photons the fitness is the "momentum". The "process of events" is the imprinting of new information on the pilot-wave from the actual history of the system point through the dissipative back-action (e.g. p. 346 of The Undivided Universe which shows how back-action simulates Penrose's "OR").

SH: This is where Penrose's OR fits so beautifully. OR is a process of quantum events which occurs in a fundamental medium - a relativistic spacetime.

JS: Your use of the term "relativistic spacetime" is inconsistent, because if it's "relativistic" it's got to be "classical", and if it's classical, the quantum gravity foam cannot play a direct role because the consequent metric fluctuations destroy the classical relativistic symmetry. No, it does not need to really. It happens the way I have described in detail above using only low-energy nonrelativistic quantum mechanics. Now Nanopoulos does actually compute, from first principles, the low-energy back-action friction numerical coefficient, which is a low-energy residue or "smile" of the Planck Puma, from the ultra-high energy superstrings and quantum gravity virtual mini black-hole effects. So, if you accept Penrose's picture, the quantum foam involves Hilbert space, so "relativistic spacetime", a purely classical notion, is not a complete picture of the C-process. You are simply out of your depth here, and should remain silent on these subtle issues.

SH: The spacetime separations and objective reductions are processes intrinsic to the very fundamental level of the universe. If experience is fundamental, it must be here. So, yes, we *are* saying that raw, undifferentiated experience - qualia - are particular non-local patterns in fundamental spacetime.

JS: I am saying that the qualia are nonlocal patterns in the pilot wave that stand outside of classical spacetime.

JS: It makes no mathematical sense to speak of a nonlocal pattern in classical spacetime. You have to use a fiber bundle in which spacetime is the base space. The nonlocality is in the fiber space above and beyond spacetime.

SH: There you go again. Hilbert space doesn't really exist. Spacetime is everywhere.

JS: You bet your sweet cookie it exists! Boy, Roger Penrose would cuff you for that like some naughty school boy in a Dickens novel, since your remark is sure to offend his Platonism.

SH: Jack is either projecting (he'd like to cuff me), or "back-biting".

Neither, I was joking! And I sure am not "ass-kissing"! :-) Seriously, the argument that Hilbert space and configuration space are less real than spacetime, amateurish at worst and Bohrish at best, is nicely refuted by Bohm and Hiley in The Undivided Universe.

SH: I actually heard that remark verbatim from Roger when I asked him about Hilbert space 2 years ago. Roger's Platonism lies within spacetime. I'd elaborate, but I'm afraid Jack would co-opt the idea.

JS: Penrose is not God. I am! :-), Seriously, I spent months in Penrose's twister seminar at Birkbeck in 1971, granted Roger is a real genius in math, but he is not always clear in his "informal language" when he is on the run, none of us are. And his mind is trapped by Bohr's fuzzy logical chains on this issue. Roger is perfectly capable of understanding my point to use the young Bohm's way of thinking, but he has not yet done so. If he would take the time, I bet he would come to agree with what I have said here. Roger wrongly thinks Hilbert space is not as fundamental as spacetime because Bohr thinks that quantum mechanics is all in the mind. From this, we are inevitably led to idealistic monism in which even spacetime is in the mind, because spacetime has to emerge from the "collapse" of something, the Hilbert space, that ain't real in order to get the classical limit of ordinary experience. So Roger is caught in a fundamental paradox which only the young Bohm can get out of!

JS:You have left the mind out of your theory of mind.

SH: Have you misplaced yours?

No, mine is firmly attached to my brain, but you have evidently lost your logic somewhere along Bohr's mystic path. :-) What I mean't by that remark, was that by throwing out the Hilbert space, which is mental, and keeping only spacetime which is material (e.g. matter bends it, even though it can also bend by itself through the Weyl tensor), you got no mind in classical spacetime.

SH: Regarding the merits of Bohm's theory, I had reiterated Dave Chalmers' objections. Jack countered:

SH (previous): As far as Bohm's theory, this is what Chalmers (1996) says:

1) it is hard to reconcile with relativity theory

JS: That is simply not true.... Bohm's theory is no more incompatible with relativity than is Bohr's theory. That's a red herring.

SH: "no more incompatible.." what an endorsement! Penrose's OR is exactly compatible. It incorporates general relativity into quantum mechanics.

I was talking about problems with special relativity - the meaning of renormalization, and relativistic collapse and so on. No physicist will agree and I include Roger.

SH (previous): 3) it is non-local to an extraordinary degree--the trajectory of every particle in the universe depends on every other particle

JS: Nonsense, the theory says nothing of the sort. Bohm's theory can do everything Bohr's theory can do and even better. John Bell, the quantum mechanic's quantum mechanic wrote that Bohm's theory is the better theory.

JS: I was not clear on this which Stapp pointed out. What I meant by the above is that Bohm's theory has a very clear way of explaining how it is that relatively local unconnected systems come into being like we find in the classical limit. This is also what decoherence is all about which can be explained in Bohm's theory. This is all done in The Undivided Universe in detail.

SH: Orch OR doesn't need Bohr's theory.

Nonsense, of course it does because you use the word "reduction". When I say "Bohr" I mean the "Copenhagen" school including Von Neumann even though there may be significant differences between them, the similarities are sufficient in the present context.

SH: Regarding Bohm, Henry Stapp has responded:

Of course, all collapse models are nonlocal, so this nonlocal aspect of the Bohm model does not really count against it, as compared to the Penrose/Hameroff theory, except perhaps that it might be argued by Penrose/Hameroff that the need to incorporate general relativity already gives some logical justification for going beyond the concepts of special relativity, and already puts issues about space and time into play, whereas the Bohm model is designed to be compatible with special relativistic quantum theory, and so in that context the instantaneous dependence of what happens in one region upon what an experimenter decides to do in a spacelike separated region seems more strange and awkward than in the Penrose/Hameroff theory, perhaps. In any case both theories are highly nonlocal. It is this nonlocal aspect of these alternatives that gives the Everett-type theories their appeal: the Everett-type theories do not violate our ordinary relativistic ideas of local causes.

Henry P. Stapp

SH (previous): In Orch OR we have a macroscopic quantum coherent state among distributed MTs.

JS: Well up until my theory there was no way to show how such a state could survive thermal disruption..

SH: Excuse me? We've proposed 3 biological mechanisms isolating/preserving Frohlich coherence in microtubules. In our current paper (in preparation) we elaborate with some very specific new ideas and evidence (and a list of testable predictions). Unfortunately I can't describe the quantum isolation mechanisms here till they're properly published, or else they soon might become Sarfatti's mechanisms.

JS: This is not true. I have never seen you give any detailed explanations in print for thermal protection of the macro-quantum state. You simply asserted it was true without proof. The precise mechanism that is original to me is in qmcarnot.html which I did publish 5 years ago in Physics Essays Sept 1991. It may well explain the experimental observation of "ordered water" you write about. I am also aware of Vitiello's idea of the energy gap in the Frohlich mode of 100kT. If you really have three new ones, that's great. The more the merrier. Also you should really retract your above remark that I steal your ideas. Your experimental stuff is great as is your general intuition that the microtubules are the physical seat of consciousness. I consistently give you lots of credit for that. So what you say above is false and is a hit below the belt. As for your "fundamental" C = spacetime "theory", it is so vague that like Gertie Stein said of Oakland, "There's no there, there." So how can I steal something which does not exist? :-)

SH (previous):Bohm's pilot waves would be one way to describe the coherence. However, in Orch OR the quantum state eventually collapses due to quantum gravity (E = h/T).

JS: Nanopoulos told me at Tucson II that he was very upset with Roger Penrose for pushing this E = h/T which is very unrigorous and according to Nanopoulos it is actually wrongly used in this context.

SH: It's a free world. Nanopoulos can think what he wants, though it sounds like "sour grapes" to me. I'll bet on Penrose any day.

Note: Hameroff's "sour grapes" remark understandably made Nanopoulos very upset.

JS: Suppose T gets large, this implies that E gets small - which seems sort of odd. Suppose we have a very complex thought requiring a very long time T to quantum compute. This says that the energy E needed for self-collapse is getting smaller and smaller. Seems it should go the other way???

SH: At last, a constructive question! Any such complex thought would actually be a series of many brief, intermittent conscious steps. E = h/T still holds. (If you don't agree with this, you're forced to say that during your very complex thought and very long T - thinking it over - you are not being at all conscious of the problem - is that what you're saying?)

JS: Well actually Penrose says something very much like that in both his books. Poincare said something like that as well, i.e., how great creative leaps come after long sub-conscious processing.

SH (previous): The collapse itself is a conscious event (this is what Jack is missing).

JS: I am not missing it. I am simply doubting it. I know Stapp says it quoting Bohr, von Neumann's et-al scripture -- but it is still an axiom right? Bohm's pilot wave effectively derives this axiom in a more fundamental and intuitively visualizable way. By making the above false objections against Bohm's theory, Stu is cutting his own virtual reality throat! No Stu, no Hari Kari yet - we still need you! :-)

What SH is missing is the fact that the quantum oscillation he pins all his hopes on exists not in spacetime, but in both configuration space and in Hilbert space, neither of which he admits is real! The domain of the quantum oscillation is configuration space, and its range is Hilbert space in the sense of functions in ordinary calculus. SH: Well Jack, *you* definitely still need me. But as I said before, without collapse, you're trapped in pre-conscious and sub-conscious processes-dreamland! You're the guy who can never get off the subway.

Roland Cook: it would appear that space-time geometry does not have the necessary qualifications for our conscious apprehension of qualities of experience of the world. .......

JS: Yes, I agree with this. The Hilbert space of pilot waves, informed by back-action from the spacetime geometry, is the seat of the soul.

SH: (Jack is now trying to sneak spacetime geometry into "his" theory...).

JS: No it's been there all along in the motion of the material system point which modifies the mind via back-action. You simply do not yet properly understand what I am proposing.

SH: But how is the conclusion regarding the inadequacy of spacetime reached? It's not as if we understand spacetime to be able to say it is inadequate for this task. What exactly is spacetime? There are several ways to try to understand it: conformal structures, strings, quantum foam, monopoles .... at the recent Oxford Conference (Geometric Issues in the Foundations of Science - honoring Roger Penrose on the occasion of his 65th birthday) the Penrose-Smolin view of "spin network" spacetime geometry was discussed: simple, complex, infinite, non-local. And even though we can only model it, we can say assuredly that spacetime truly exists.

JS: Oh, OK finally you clarify that you don't mean classical spacetime. Well in that more general sense I agree with you. But still you are too vague about it. I actually have a much more detailed model that I gave above. Your notion of "spacetime" includes pilot waves. It's too broad to be useful.

Roland Cook: What is implied by this discussion and by the extensive references to such experiences as mystical, transpersonal, drug-induced and other experience in this forum is that, in my opinion, the brain must be a receptor vehicle for conscious apprehension. That is, consciousness is an input to the brain rather than an output from the brain.

JS: In my theory consciousness is the result of the brain imprinting sensory information on the attached pilot wave via back-action. Intent and choice are from the action of the Bohm quantum force -gradQ of the mind pilot-wave on its brain.

SH: Not quite. Fundamental experience (and Platonic logic) may be embedded as non-local patterns in spacetime ...

JS: SH's idea of "spacetime" here is so broad that it does include everything I have said in a much more detailed precise and testable way.

SH: consciousness is a process occurring in our brains (microtubules) which configures and accesses the fundamental experience and Platonic logic.This may be a semantic difference.

SH: Michael Baggot asks Jack ("quantum homunculus"): How does volition or free-will (or limited free-will) enter this picture?

JS: The mind (pilot-wave) takes in information from the external world of matter in motion via the back-action B. Since the pilot wave is protected from interactive decoherence from the hot surroundings...

SH: If the pilot wave is protected/isolated, how does it take in information?

JS: That's easy! The thermal protection is protection from random incoherent noisy disruptions which leaves it clear for coherent signals to get through in the form of changing near-EM fields for example, or from organized ion-transport as another example. Besides, you need this thermal protection as much as I do. You are the guy claiming three kinds of thermal protection, so how do you explain it?

JS: The halting of the quantum computer is the mental act of freely-willed decision.

SH: Why/how does it halt?

SH: In technologically envisioned quantum computers, halting occurs by environmental interaction-someone or something interrupts the superposition causing collapse.

Right, but when it's protected it "self-collapses-without collapse" (i.e., gets captured by a basin of attraction in the fitness landscape) because back-action (in the Nanopoulos/GRW sense of p.346 of Undivided Universe) has it's own self-organizing decoherence time (which may originate from the Planck scale says Nanopoulos). So I have a much more detailed picture of your "orchestrated self collapse" based on the superiority of Bohm's paradigm over Bohr's in terms of visualizability.

SH: In Orch OR, the MT-based quantum superposition self-halts (collapses) due to quantum gravity E = h/T. Only with self-collapse do you get non-computable processing, or conscious thought ( Penrose 1989; 1994).

JS: I am not sure what "non-computable" really means here, but I think it gets into the "precognition" model of Ed May's DAT theory e.g. emay.html

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