I. J. Good in "The Scientist Speculates" published some thirty years ago first suggested that the explanation for quantum indeterminism is that individual quantum events that actually happen here and now have future advanced causes as well has past retarded causes. Penrose alludes to this in "The Emperor's New Mind" when he remarks that mind time is different from physical time. He cites experiments by Benjamin Libet which strongly suggest that our free will acts "teleologically" (1) back in time by a second or two. This may be the physical basis for Penrose's claim that "understanding" by living minds is essentially non- algorithmic or non-computable. The key feature of the execution of any algorithm in a computation is its retarded causal character. One starts with initial data, and executes a series of instructions forward in time. Sir Fred Hoyle, in his book, "The Intelligent Universe" (Holt Rhinehart and Winston, 1986) argues that individual quantum fluctuations in the brain are guided from an advanced intelligence in our far future in what Hoyle calls "loops in time". Hoyle's ideas are echoed in Frank Tipler's book, "The Physics of Immortality" in which God is a super intelligent computer at the Omega Point final spacetime singularity in a big crunch cosmology requiring a closed universe. Conscious experience is tied to entropy rather than "real" clock time. The "imaginary time" (2) of entropy shoots up to infinity in the finite clock time of the asymmetrically sheared big crunch. The effective experienced "imaginary" lifetime of conscious creatures is then infinite making immortality thinkable. Tipler then goes further and conjectures that this "God" (3) will resurrect us as computer simulations. Penrose's thesis that mind is non-computable would seem to prevent this unless there is some generalized notion of a classical algorithm which permits future causes and loops in time. These are interesting unsolved problems for the "new" or what I call "post-modern physics".
Penrose has some new physics in the second part of "Shadows of the Mind". One is his "new criterion" what he calls "OR" in which the Copenhagen "collapse" interpretation solution of the measurement problem is replaced by a mechanism that involves gravitation in an essential way. Brian Josephson, in a private e-mail communication, had expressed a fundamental objection to Penrose's criterion which he later withdrew after clarification from Penrose. Josephson writes:
"Jack -- re your comment, I should have kept you up to date on this. I finally nabbed Penrose at a meeting and he clarified the situation. The criterion for a superposition between two states to decay should be that you consider the energy associated with the difference in gravitational fields associated with the two components. This is slightly different from what he said in his book, that it is the difference in the two gravitational energies that matters (i.e. it's a matter of energy of difference vs. difference of energies). With the criterion correctly stated (and that makes more sense anyway) my objections don't apply."
Penrose's collaborator, Stuart Hameroff, also by private e-mail, has informed of a new gravitational calculation by Penrose soon to be published which gives a critical number of cortical neurons in the brain required for a single conscious thought. This number of about 10,000 neurons seems to be in accord with brain observations. Again we all look forward to the details of this paper as a major event in quantum consciousness research. Hameroff writes:
"Dear Jack, In our new paper, the calculations for 500 msec of quantum coherence require 10^9 (ten to the ninth) tubulins to "self-collapse" or undergo a type of objective reduction (OR) called "orchestrated reduction (Orch OR). How many neurons this may correspond with is subject to how many tubulins per neuron (best estimate by Yu and Bass is about 10^7 (ten to the seventh), plus how many tubulins per neuron are coherent (in superconductors only 1 in 10,000 or so can sustain a macroscopic state). Thus we can only estimate a range of from hundreds to thousands of neurons. 10,000 would be an upper limit for 500 msec. For shorter times, more tubulins.The gravity questions I'll defer to Roger, but it has to do with fundamental properties of space-time.In Shadows, Roger states that superposed states each have their own space-time geometry."
Is Penrose's gravitational criterion independent of the nature of the world line on which the brain sits? For example, take motion near or through a black hole. If an observer freely falls on a timelike geodesic through the event horizon of a large enough black hole he will feel nothing unusual until later on when the tidal forces of the singularity radially stretch and tangentially squeeze even his atoms out of existence. Does the Penrose gravitational collapse of the quantum wave function depend directly on the classical tidal forces from the curvature tensor, or does it depend on the g-field felt by non-inertial observers which is eliminated in free fall? Obviously not, or we would notice weird consciousness changes in astronauts. Penrose's criterion involves quantum gravity which is still not well-formulated. The creation of a single graviton seems to be required for consciousness. On the other hand the notion of a graviton is from perturbation theory and the quantization of gravity seems to be essentially non- perturbative. It is too early to judge the utility of Penrose's attempt to use gravitation and quantum theory in the solution of the mind-matter problem but his efforts are intriguing and worthy of close attention.
The other important new idea in "Shadows of the Mind" is his review of the "microtubule" model of consciousness based on observations of Stuart Hameroff MD. on the action of anesthetic molecule which apparently jam into hydrophobic spaces preventing the single electron quantum jumps that control the configuration of protein dimers on neuron walls. There is also evidence of coherent electromagnetic radiation inside the hollow microtubules which form a ubiquitous infrastructure of ionic transport inside every living cell. The loss of consciousness when these all- important electrons are frozen by the anesthetic molecules is an important clue. These electrons may be the "Eccles Gates" where mind connects with matter.
Although dualistic solutions of the mind-matter problem are held in bad oder by purely phenomenological cognitive and neuroscience it is the only picture which makes sense physically. This is not Cartesian dualism in which mind is "nonphysical" or "supernatural". Both mind and matter are physical and natural in the quantum dualism that I am presenting here. Classical physics is totally deterministic in principle although unpredictable chaos due to fractal strange attractors in classical phase space dominate complex systems and play essential roles in brain function. There is no room for "mind" in classical physics. Similarly, there is no room for conscious mind with intent or free will in orthodox quantum mechanics which is totally indeterministic. Complete determinism or complete indeterminism equally kill the possibility for intelligent free will. We exist beyond both classical physics and orthodox quantum mechanics. In this sense, Penrose's quest for a "new criterion" beyond orthodox quantum mechanics and his notion that understanding is beyond classical computational ideas has something essentially right about it even if some particular details of his gravitational model need to be modified. On this, Josephson and Penrose are in agreement since Josephson claims that the statistical patterns of orthodox quantum mechanics, accurate for inanimate matter, fail for living matter. Further fuel for Josephson's fire has recently been provided by Henry Pierce Stapp in the July 18, 1994 Physical Review A (PP 18-24). Stapp presents a detailed model for a "delayed choice" psychokinetic experiment by Helmut Schmidt in which the "intent" of a conscious observer violates the statistical patterns of orthodox quantum mechanics. Stapp's remarkable paper explains real data that he has allegedly replicated according to a private communication of George Weissman to this author.
The fundamental quantum solution to the mind-matter problem, in my opinion, has been provided by a little-noted remark by the late David Bohm. Unlike the Copenhagen interpretation which Stapp uses, Bohm's ontological interpretation of quantum theory retains the classical particle along with its quantum wave function. The Copenhagen interpretation throws away the classical particle and keeps only the wave function as a complete description of physical reality at the fundamental level. Bohm's great idea, whose full significance was not even realized by him apparently, is that orthodox quantum mechanics is the result of an approximation in which the nonlocally acting quantum wave function of a group of particles acts on each particle directly, causing deviations from the motion imposed by classical force fields, but there is no direct "back reaction" of the particles on their collective wave function. It is this absence of back-reaction that results in the "unitary" conservation of quantum probability current which maintains the statistical patterns of orthodox quantum mechanics. It is obvious that this lack of a feedback loop from matter to its own wave function is what is responsible for the notorious "uncontrollable" randomness of quantum processes in inanimate matter. Any mechanism that has back-reaction provides a feedback loop which allows intentional control causing a distortion of the random statistical patterns of orthodox quantum mechanics. Bohm's back reaction introduces a nonlinear term into the Schrodinger equation with a non-unitary time evolution in striking accord with Stapp's phenomenological model and Josephson's intuitive ideas. Stapp's subjective Whiteheadean idealistic Copenhagen- type picture is, of course, very different from the objective nonlocal materialistic picture of Bohm. Nevertheless, like the apparently conflicting pictures of Heisenberg and Schrodinger in the 1920s they have essential common ground. The view that emerges is that conscious mind is some kind of macroscopically coherent quantum wave function in the brain that is protected from entanglement with the thermal environment. The microtubule picture presented in Penrose's book seems to provide the ideal physical substrate for this model. In particular, the leading candidate for mind is the collective quantum wave function of the quantum connected single electron "switches" sitting in superpositions of two positions at the alpha-beta boundary of each protein dimer. The hydrophobic cage effect seems to provide protection of decoherence of the mental wave function with the thermal environment while allowing read-write couplings, via Frohlich electric dipole membrane oscillation, of data stored in the dimer array to the coherent self-trapped electromagnetic filaments inside the hollow wave guides of the tubules in "vicinal" water (p.368). This mental wave function of the electron Eccles Gates not only exerts nonlocally coordinated quantum forces on each Eccles gate which is transduced to nanoscale protein dimer configurational changes affecting nerve impulse transmission, hence, our overt muscular behavior. But, in addition, the back reaction of the electrons on their collective wave function completes the feedback-control loop in which the mental wave function is itself modified by its actions on the outside world of matter. The completion of this loop is the mechanism of awareness, of perception. For what else can perception be but the changes in the wave function induced by changes in the configurations of particles to which the wave function couples? Memory and creative foresight involve the nonlocal influences of the wave function. Recent work by Yakir Aharonov and students show how the wave function is not only nonlocal in space but also nonlocal in time. The nonlocality in time is clearly of interest in forming quantum models of past memories as well as future memories which are found in experiments on "precognitive remote viewing".
In summary, the constellation of thought-provoking ideas in both of Penrose's books is a rich data base stimulating new modes of inquiry for research in the emerging non-orthodox quantum mechanics of consciousness.
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(1)
"Suppose there is even something vaguely teleological about the effects of consciousness, so that a future impression might affect a past action."
Emperor's New Mind, p.212
(2) Louis De Broglie first pointed out the idea that entropy is "imaginary" action. Boltzmann's constant k (for the conversion of bits to the dissipation of free energy) is the imaginary version of Planck's constant h. The invariant "real" proper time of a point particle is proportional to its dynamical action in the Feynman path quantum probability amplitude. Entropy as imaginary action and, consequently, imaginary proper time, causes a non-unitary decay or growth in the Feynman amplitude.
(3) Tipler's idea of the Omega Point intelligence echoes the earlier notion of "GOD(D)" published by I. J. Good in a 1981 lecture.