Brain Really Uses Quantum Effects, New Study Finds

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When Roger Penrose originally came out with the idea that the human brain uses quantum effects in microtubules and that was the origin of consciousness, many thought the idea was a little crazy. According to a new study, it turns out that Penrose was actually right… about the microtubules anyways. Let’s have a look.
Paper: pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs....
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#science #sciencenews #quantum #biology

[@gustavmont]

I never imagined that Sabine would comment on one of my papers. I am super-happy!

[@shyamfrancis9350]

Hi. What do you think about this video? How is this research gonna impact neuroscience??

[@paulobr5884]

😮

[@Bluefalconspiracies]

Me neither! In fact she still hasn’t. But 🥳

[@naromsky]

Way to go.

[@Truth_Teller_101]

Did your microtube get a little bit bigger?

[@user-nh5ze8hq5e]

Psychedelics are just an exceptional mental health breakthrough. It's quite fascinating how effective they are against depression and anxiety. Saved my life.

[@ToniMonteroroman]

Can you help with the reliable source I would really appreciate it. Many people talk about mushrooms and psychedelics but nobody talks about where to get them. Very hard to get a reliable source here in Australia. Really need!

[@BestOffer-ii9ny]

Yes, dr.porass. I have the same experience with anxiety, depression, PTSD and addiction and Mushrooms definitely made a huge huge difference to why am clean today.

[@HAMZAPINE]

I wish they were readily available in my place. Microdosing was my next plan of care for my husband. He is 59 & has so many mental health issues plus probable CTE & a TBI that left him in a coma 8 days. It's too late now I had to get a TPO as he's 6'6 300+ pound homicidal maniac. He's constantly talking about killing someone. He's violent. Anyone reading this Familiar w/ BPD know if it is common for an obsession with violence.

[@ToniMonteroroman]

Is he on instagram?

[@BestOffer-ii9ny]

Yes he is dr.porass.

[@user-he1yb7pl1w]

Roger is an absolute treasure to have for so many years. Penrose simply came to this conclusion because he doesn't believe consciousness is a computational process. He also doesn't believe that it's a chemical process. So he was looking for something with the right geometry in the body that could explain a wave collapse function. Sabine he is crazy in a very good way and has brilliant ideas. We all could learn something from him and his views on science and biology.

[@schmetterling4477]

Why do you want to learn to bullshit like an old man? Isn't it bad enough that you are bullshitting like a young one? ;-)

[@Frrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrt]

Still waiting for the scientific community to investigate YOGA. It works, the best universities in the world use it. Should we give a little peak into what they are doing, even though that method doesn't use the scientific method?? Shall we? We are so fixated with the brain, and we leave aside the rest of the body. Other cultures have developed a very precise knowledge of what consciousness might be. Do we want to have a look to what happens to their brains and bodies? Can we? Is it too hard to accept that someone else was right, even though they weren't using the scientific method? It's never gonna happen. So materialistic we are as a community. We need to "see", we need to touch, if these two things are not there, we say "it doesn't exist". There you go; yoga says the exact opposite: that what doesn't exist, also exists! Does it remind you of anything? I don't know... like the universe made mostly of nothingness??? They call it dark matter, dark energy etc... daaaahhh Can we please, just see, explore, what they have done, just to see if they were just lucky in predicting EVERYTHING we are proving today.... after thousands of years that they have been saying the SAME EXACT THINGS. Is it too hard to explore? No, better to destroy their cultures and countries, and then define them as religions...... OMG... so stupid, so narrow minded. If you say to someone who practices yoga that that is a religion, they might spit you in the face. They normally wouldn't, because differently from "uncoscious" people, they can control their emotions, knowing what consciousness is.... GOODNIGHT WESTERN WORLD. When you'll come up with the solutions for your existential problems, that someone has already probably solved, but doesn't have any of your attention, probably the world will be already over.

[@Notnohenceforth]

I really can't agree with you Science is all about method to demonstrate the result If the result is not found through a coherent, logical method, then the result doesn’t matter (even if it is shown as right later, as long as it's not proved it doesn’t have a real value) Your Yoga precepts might be true, but where is the logic behind ? If there's none, it doesn’t matter that it's true

[@Frrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrt]

@@Notnohenceforth it's not mine, yoga. It's of cultures that have obviously been completely destroyed. Including yoga itself (has been largely destroyed). However, try and compute and prove consciousness. Can you? Can we? It's just a question remember! I think not. And... I'll repeat it to you, these cultures are saying the exact same things science is saying. You just haven't read or tried anything about them. Can personal experience be proven by science? No. Can science prove consciousness? No. Can a human being experience things? Yes. Should we try experience instead of just numbers. This is a very logical argument for "my" yoga.

[@Frrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrt]

@@Notnohenceforth and however their methods work... The best universities in the world use it. Ask them why?

[@raphaelrossi6339]

People often say we exist in a macro world and can’t intuitively grasp the quantum world as there are no examples of it in the macro world. Yet there is an example that we deal with every second of our lives, figuratively right under, or literally right behind our noses. We can never know what we are going to be thinking about until we actually think about it at that instance. Otherwise the best we can guess is what we probably will be thinking about. I think therefore I probably am.

[@iii1429]

Gyatt

[@simplymax2125]

That honestly reminds me of Schrödinger’s cat. Your thoughts are undetermined until observed. The only question is, what’s observing them? Are they observing themselves? Does your consciousness observe them? Does God? We can’t know really.

[@starcraft2f2p77]

@@simplymax2125 Not enough replies

[@dr_ned_flanders]

The stock footage of designing a V6 engine was particularly illustrative for this quantum process.

[@mikemondano3624]

Shhh! You're supposed to close one eye and squint.

[@davidwright8432]

... on a suitably chosen macroscopic level, of course.

[@Jsmith32t]

There is already an interesting paper out there regarding a quantum piston engine, so it’s relevant 😉

[@seraph7221]

It had dual overhead cams, 'overhead' cams. Coincidence? I think not.

[@jihadjoe]

My brain is probably more like an inline-3...

[@OGPedXing]

3:50 I'm amazed that the microtubile test machine looks so much like a v6 internal combustion engine block with a dual overhead cam and valve train! Sorry, as a car guy, I couldn't resist.😅

[@thisnamewastakentoo_]

Although it would explain the low rumbling sound and excess heat whenever I try to think.

[@irjake]

You can't improve on a classic 😂

[@michaelharrison1093]

That explains a lot - all car enthusiasts know that V6 engines sound terrible and there are very few exceptions - I figure that my brain must have lots of tiny Busso V6 engines

[@Paxmax]

Haahahhaha There it is! Thx for typing my comment too! 😂😂😂👌

[@leswhitehouse]

Yep, that's a V6 engine!

[@improveourselves3929]

That's very fascinating because I and other people with autism, according to one study I read, have shorter microtubules but many many more of them than normal brains. I have synesthesia and a few savant skills. I've always wondered if this is related to our different way of looking at the world. It's a different brain organization and now you've given me more food for thought about the role of microtubules. I remember reading Penrose's work on consciousness long ago, so it's very interesting that we've actually corroborated some of his hypotheses. Fascinating video thanks again Sabine!

[@zagyex]

Wow, never heard of that. Do you have a source I can read about this?

[@improveourselves3929]

@@zagyex pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38187634/

[@improveourselves3929]

@@zagyex sorry it appears that I'll need to paste it after a carriage return let's see if this works... pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38187634/

[@Chareidos]

That sounds very interesting. Would really love to learn more about that.

[@obamabinbiden9762]

I have a few questions for you if you don't mind. You mentioned having synesthesia - can you describe what that experience is like for you? What specific senses get crossed or combined? You also said you have "a few savant skills" - what specific skills are you referring to? Skills in what domains? thanks.

[@petermason7799]

I liked this suggestion from Penrose and Hameroff when I first heard of it. I am encouraged to see it appear again. I even did some research at that time and I remember that a "standard" test for the effectiveness of anesthetic involved measuring the sink rate in olive oil. I also found a paper that described how some blue microorganism which used microtubules as a method of propulsion, cessed to move when they were anesthetised. All I can add now is my thanks to the spell checker for correcting the use of so much anesthetic.

[@wipe3100]

I don't like it, and won't even call that science, at least not yet. For the moment, this idea is still at the stage of a hazardous hypothesis, for at least three reasons: * the premises, namely that consciousness would not be a computable process in the sense of Turing, remains to be proven. * the mechanism which would give rise to the consciousness of a quantum phenomenon, and how it would be articulated with the known mechanisms of the brain, is not at all specified. * the observations made are very far from the theory to be constructed. We have shown that a phenomenon exists, we know nothing about its usefulness. Just because my washing machine makes noise doesn't mean it's the noise that washes the clothes, or even that it's useful for anything. Of course, hazardous hypothesis can lead eventually to good science. But in that case, I'm very dubious. There are much more elements lately showing how machines can be more creative than we thought, and that consciousness is just a computable process.

[@petermason7799]

For sink rate read solubility

[@petermason7799]

Try Justin Riddle who is very long winded but takes the hypothesis of consciousness to an even more fundamental level. The origin of life.

[@Astrodicted]

@@wipe3100 And who are you exactly?

[@wipe3100]

@@Astrodicted I don't think knowing who I am would help you understand the points I've made. And which are easy to verify.

[@ScramJett]

Gotta say, I loved that when you talked about the researchers building a computer model, it was a stock video of someone building a six cylinder engine in a 3D CAD program.

[@jpslaym0936]

Geez. Those ICE engines are getting so sophisticated, using quantum computing and all

[@shazzz_land]

But she s making an average of 200k view per video. She makes more money from yt than a quantum computer engineer or HPC engineer

[@guard13007]

I also was thrown out of the video for a moment by "that's not even close to the right kind of building a model".

[@AlienScientist]

Reminds me of the time scientists built a computer model to prove that 9/11 wasn't an inside job... Instead of doing actual forensics...

[@gugancapuzzi1855]

3:50

[@Thomas-gk42]

😂Physicists might be crazy, but I´m sure, Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff are smart enough to love the humor in this video

[@inevitablemeeting9197]

They'd be really stupid if they didn't.

[@biedl86]

What do you mean "humor"? She's German. That's just honesty disguised by a rhetoric that can't possibly be put in either the irony or serious camp.

[@vidal9747]

I swear that finding a totally sane Physicist is harder than finding dark matter. I study Physics in college btw.

[@johannuys7914]

@@biedl86 In Germany, humour is no laughing matter.

[@biedl86]

@@johannuys7914 My German spider senses detected an idiom I cannot just turn around and say that laughing in Germany is no humour matter.

[@maxheadrom3088]

The logic breaks when we find out there's no good definition for consciousness. I heard Penrose speaking about his ideas and he's always clear in his wording that convey how much those ideas are just a piece of wood that someday will be part of the paper where the blueprint will rest.

[@Xanaduum]

Trying to locate consciousness in the human brain is like trying to locate the desktop image in the silicon chips that produce it.

[@THVEssays]

Perhaps you won't see an image of a racecar in your computer, but we can track and locate exactly where and how the data that becomes the image moves from the hard drive/SSD/The Internet, to CPU, to RAM, to GPU/CPU, to the screen. The issue with consciousness at the moment is that there is not even a theoretical framework for how it comes to be. Unlike an image on your computer, which has a clearly trackable process of getting to your screen.

[@Xanaduum]

@@THVEssays what I mean is, if anyone has any chance whatsoever of working it out, first you have to make sure you don't get stuck in that heuristic. And of course, it's easier with a computer because we built them from scratch and have the history of the processes that went into the development of it all the way back to Jaquard machines. With a brain, it's like reverse engineering a machine that was never even designed by an original designer. Then we have the complexity of emergent phenomena, and to top it all off the Buddhist-like possibility that consciousness might just be a kind of smoke and mirrors trick.

[@MattJDylan]

I like Penrose. Even when he's wrong or doing an immense leap, he always pushes forward new ideas. And fortunately he has enough credit to not be dismissed instantly. We need more of this in every science field: to entertain new ideas with an *healthy* dose of criticism, instead of discarding everything right from the get-go. We behave way too much like we've already peaked as far as knowledge goes: we need to be more humble and entertain new ideas in a better way. Also, it's not totally fair to call Penrose "crazy". I've been in a physics university for long period of times without being part of it. I can confidently attest that EVERY physicist is crazy...

[@michael1]

I dunno, I think it's someone who is really smart from a family of people who are all really smart struggling with the idea that the one thing they're good at might not be that complex or difficult after all. It's perhaps the only thing we have too - as human beings there are plenty of things faster, stronger etc. But we've always overestimated our smarts relative to everything else we have around us. At first other species, and now our own machines. So it's got to be difficult to come to terms with the, increasingly likely possibility that normal, turing based computation is going to outsmart people. You can see that when the microcomputer revolution started a lot of the media was almost like "well soon we'll have robot slaves doing everything" - they really had little or no clue just how difficult and complex the problem was. We knew that computers could out calculate people but intellectuals rested safe that fast computation is not intelligence. The computer isn't "thinking" it just follows a simple set of instructions that loop or repeat. And making a statement that it's not possible to make a computer "think" with a set of simple instructions wasn't difficult to believe when computer scientists were first trying to write algorithms to do things that didn't really require a smart human being. Along the way some problems we manage to solve by brute force out number crunching people - like the first computers that beat humans at chess. Very few people fretted that this was "intelligence" coming. We can separate that from the notion of AI as just being another example where computers can look at millions more positions and evaluate them compared with a human. But what we're left with still is puzzling. Humans play chess to a high standard and if they're not doing millions and millions of calculations then what is the process? Is it still just simple calculation? - Penrose doesn't want that to be true. He needs there to be something more to a brain than simple calculation. But I think as we now develop machine learning we come up with a program that can win at chess or go that isn't simply number crunching - because Go cannot easily be solved that brute force way - and the algorithm is : we've given it the basic rules of chess and then set the computer playing itself over and over millions and millions of times. So there's still a number crunching element (no human player has played millions and millions of games of chess) but there's a sense where the computer plays well without having to blindly number crunch every potential move and counter move. But we still don't think of this as some kind of sentience or consciousness. So Penrose can still hope that human brains are doing something that silicon cannot. After Stephen Hawking got rich and popular talking about black holes in layman terms Roger probably figured he could write a popular book that would sell outside of academia. He pretty much doesn't like the idea that there's a computer program I can potential run on a suitably powerful computer written in C or python, i.e normal computer architecture stuff that would have consciousness, intelligence, sentience or whatever you want to call it. Perhaps the first problem you encounter when trying to talk about this, especially in layman terms, is there's no real clear definition of a lot of these terms, what sentience, intelligence or consciousness even are. Since it's only ever layman discussion anyway we might decide to suggest that : ever since the microcomputer revolution (and perhaps even before), we've been waiting for and expecting the computers from our science fiction shows to become a reality. That definitely was a thing when the first chatbots appeared - and even now these 'alexa' type things are people who wish you could just say "Hey computer book me some tickets at the theatre on Wednesday night" and have it do it. Data from star trek, Orac from Blake's seven, the computer you say "Hey computer..." and chat to it that gives the TV show some exposition. These computers are all smarter than us, and often a bit arrogant - which is very like some human smart people. Occasionally, to avoid a plot hole, it has to resort to some "Insufficient data captain - cannot compute" thing - and, of course, always in science fiction some aspect of humanity outwits the computer and shows its limitations - and I feel this is where Penrose comes from - that fear writers have about technology in everything from 1984, Brave new world, the matrix et al - as well as shows like Black mirror - people fear what they don't understand and no matter how smart we think Penrose is I picture him struggling to turn on his laptop because he has the kind of smarts that existed before computers were everywhere. Data, for example, in ST:TNG, switches from scene to scene from being the most intelligent thing in existence to a complete and total turnip - it makes no sense but that's how we want to see AI, as a intellectual powerhouse but completely naive and, of course, typically there's a scene later in the movie where the AI starts harming people and we have to destroy it - and, as I said, it's always the case the writers have something the computer lacks that humans have which makes us prevail - that's where Penrose hope is. Because without that hope what is he? He's a guy whose entire life and family is really premised on being really smart. If I can buy a computer that's as smart as Penrose it's game over. It's no different to the creative people who desperately cling to the hope that you can't write a simple algorithm that will churn out something we usually associate with human creativity - a book, a poem, a piece of music - and there's lot of waffling and hand-waving about how to write a piece of music that moves people I need life experience to feel these emotions and the idea a computer can't feel anything so it's output will always be lacking that human element - but, increasingly machine learning is making it look like music, art etc will be produced to a very high standard by computers anon. So I do think there's an element in his thinking out loud that is really no different to a skilled computer programmer seeing that in the future it seems undoubtedly the case that a computer program will write better code than a human. And where does that leave them? You know people who couldn't knit as a fast a loom might have lost jobs, but we never felt threatened intellectually by machines - and Roger tried to write a book explaining why we'll never be threatened, but the chances are that he was wrong and as time moves on he's added to his argument some of the holes he left because he openly didn't really understand neuroscience etc at a deep enough level (and its a layman book) AI and machine learning have moved on too. Roger is still safe in the fact that it's highly likely that the machine learning we're using now to create impressive things like chatgpt are a long way short of consciousness or sentience - and that we need some other technique that no one knows yet to create a general intelligence - that he can still argue that it will never happen and no one can show he's wrong, because chatgpt may well be as good as its ever going to be. Even if you give it a bigger and bigger data set and more and more parameters, it's not like one day you'll add enough data that it hits sentience as in the terminator movie. We have no idea how to write computer software that's as intelligent as a human yet or even if its possible - but it seems likely that Penrose's hope it isn't possible is going to be wrong.

[@MattJDylan]

@@michael1 I won't argue point-by-point, but my argument is simple: if Penrose is so afraid of such scenario, why would he try to advance knowledge in this area? After all the simplest way to replicate something is to fully understand it first. We can't replicate consciousness because we don't really grasp it; but such researches could bring us way closer than any large language model ever could: you study the source directly, instead of trying to making sense of what it produced. In a way, it's like trying to find what disease is causing the problem, instead of curing every symptom separately hoping it would somehow work the same. As for science fiction, it's still fiction. They have to write a story out of it, and "AI is good, can solve everything and everything goes fine" doesn't make for a good story. And those stories say something about us, not about AI: they're relatable because they talk about our fears and hopes about something we don't know (fear of being replaced as the dominant species, or hope we have that "magic little something" that will make us still superior even with less raw computing intelligence). But it in the end those are all stories and they're all about us: as of now, AI and computing aren't really anything but number-crunchers that work on a set of instructions and mimic whatever they saw us doing. And nothing will be any different until we ourselves understand what consciousness really is.

[@michael1]

@@MattJDylan He's not advancing anything in the field of computer science or AI so far as I'm aware. And I've seen really no strong argument from Penrose's articles with clickbait titles like "Consciousness must be beyond computable physics" other than he doesn't really like the idea that consciousness might be computable. I think deGrasse Tyson's take on why he doesn't do drugs is better - paraphrasing him he basically points out just how crap the brain is. How poor it functions. How easily with a few optical or aural illusions we can both experience and demonstrate its flaws in recognising objects and its perception of the world - and that makes him reticent to throw other drugs or chemicals into the mix. As I say I think Penrose's problem is he has a significant overestimation of how good the brain is because he's smart and his family are smart. In their experience applying the brain has yielded much success in many different endeavours. Chess, music, maths, physics. The idea that to discover your brain is complex but not actually nearly functioning anywhere near as well as you perceive and if it seems technology may well one day not only equal it but surpass it wouldn't be an attractive idea. Not unlike the simpler minds who, in the past, didn't want to entertain the idea that the universe is a vast place in which we are completely insignificant. It was important to them to not only make the Earth the centre of the universe but to grasp at any possible alternative explanation as more evidence came along suggesting that world view made no sense. Now I'm not suggesting RP is going to start nailing people to church doors or anything but I still believe his arguments are arguments from the same egotistical human viewpoint that we must be special. In the Earth centric view it's the flaw that we're special in the eyes of some deity. In Penrose's case he thinks his brain must be special rather than what I believe is the far more likely thing - it's just an organic computer. We're just machines made of meat. Complex ones - far more complex than any machine we have yet built ourselves, but machines nevertheless.

[@GrandActionPotential]

Penrose is thought of as a "super-genius" in the funding world. His ideas, no matter how absurd, stimulates funding for others.

[@MattJDylan]

@@michael1 I don't see how your view and the view you're abscribing to penrose are antithetical: yes, our brain and senses work like a machine (or more like the other way around, since we built machines to mimic the work of nature). But (his point) there's clearly something missing that we haven't figured out: if computing brute force was all it took, well, computers have way more than us already. And we don't know if we'll ever find out what that something is, since... well... we don't know what we are even looking for...

[@Dan_Campbell]

Been hoping you would cover this topic, thanks doc.

[@semicell]

When I first heard this idea from Penrose, I thought it was absolutely brilliant. I never expected so many people to think his idea was far fetched. I am so glad to see that he is getting credit for this discovery while he is still alive. I would also like to point out that he believes the link to a theory of everything lies in deeply understanding “what constitutes an observer”. I believe this discovery is crucial to answering that question and that we will realize that he was right about the significance of this question too

[@NightcoreHappy]

Thank you Sabine for the informative News

[@Not.Satoshi]

I have always found Penrose’s theories quite interesting. Whether right or wrong, at least he is offering a different perspective in areas we lack understanding. It is very cool that this study suggests he may be on to something with his consciousness theory.

[@p.bckman2997]

Well, all cells (nerve cells or otherwise) have microtubuli. If consciousness emerges from them, then all cells have a capacity for producing elements of consciousness, which really only means consciousness is a phenomenon tied to living organisms. Basically, we're back to square one.

[@Calogero-C1975]

that would explain, at least, why nobody can explain how our brain works 😇

[@burtdanams4426]

I mean he’s not really. This is the general idea that literally hundreds for at this point probably millions of people have understood that there is definitely some role of quantum mechanics going on with our brain body functioning, because quantum effects are happening all the time. So when you have a bunch of neurons packed in a bunch of different orientations, with different connections and activation potentials and varying specializations, different purposes, with random amounts of activation potential, randomness in frequency, and you have all these systems tied together, constantly unregulating and downregulating, and exciting or inhibiting things around them and thus cascading down through all the layers and paths and it’s more like a bunch of noise until you have everything looping together and slowly filtering out the noise from other systems. And all this additional randomness in how much of a neurotransmitter is going to be released, or how different systems are going to interact with hormones or really any chemical or electrical activity in the brain Clearly there has to be some quantum effects when you have so much activity packed into one place with the ability to interact with multiple cells or molecules at the same time It’s just a question of whether or not these quantum effects do anything and whether or not it has anything to do with what we humans want to naturally think of as ‘consciousness’

[@ObliqueReference]

Ah, the old God of the Gaps. Or Quantum Pablum of the Gaps.

[@chaosmonkey1595]

There's nothing here suggesting he might be onto something related to consciousness. Sabine herself says so in this very video, yet you and many others claim otherwise.

[@januslast2003]

I think Penrose said that the key might be to understand how general anesthesia works. We currently don't know. All we know is that it "knocks us out" (puts an end to consciousness), and after the anesthesia wears off, consciousness resumes where it left off. So anesthesia stops the quantum stuff?

[@brothermine2292]

If memory serves, Penrose's colleague Hameroff is the one who studied the effect of general anaesthesia on microtubules, and he found that it interferes with their quantum coherence.

[@richardoldfield6714]

This only works if it's true that the brain generates conscious, rather than being mainly a filter of it (for evolutionary survival purposes). After all, if you cut an electrical wire in two, an electric current can no longer flow along it, but we do not thereby conclude that the unbroken wire is itself generating the electric current that it carries. Nor do we conclude that a radio station has stopped transmitting if a component in our radio stops working and so prevents us from hearing the radio transmission.

[@Butmunch666]

@@richardoldfield6714 I liken it to a radio tranceiver that is no longer able to receive a signal.

[@ArmadilloGodzilla]

It interrupts the remote control tubules which qnnoys our supradimensional players.

[@av8r195]

from what i know anesthesia work by inhibiting neuron firing inside the brain resulting in less brain activity which results in being unconscious.

[@docmoreau7540]

It's the first video I see on the channel, but I already like it solely for Dr. Hossenfelder's ability to say funny things with straight face.

[@elplanetadorado5476]

Thank you Sabine for spreading the good knowledge and science.

[@oatlord]

Lol "it's tubes all the way down, people" made me laugh with the delivery.

[@fgaron2000]

I was about to write the same comment. Gold

[@brightmatter]

I appreciate the callback. Good stuff.

[@TonkarzOfSolSystem]

string theorists malding right now

[@zengokigyh]

This MUST have to do with Robert Sapolsky's book Determined (Oct 2023), where in chapter one, he anecdotes a joke that goes "It's turtles, all the way down"

[@MilGrip76]

Good stuff right thurr.

[@Itachi21x]

Roger Penrose is a real treasure and I am so glad I got the honor meeting him and talk to him personally. The signed book is one of my most precious possessions.

[@paulklee5790]

Lucky you… that’s boasting rights for eternity in my book…

[@mielivalta]

I have been wanting to meet Sir Penrose for a long time!

[@ScramJett]

Just out of curiosity, which book was it that you had him sign?

[@jackassplus]

actually finishing Road to Reality is on my bucket list.

[@michael1]

@@ScramJett Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy.

[@jonswap9097]

I think the consciousness thing relates to whether everything we do is predictable and therefore predetermined. The quantum mechanics principle of uncertainty supposedly means that we do not behave in a predetermined way, and so we supposedly have a consciousness - whatever that is because we do not behave in a predetermined like robots.

[@mudmonkeymagic]

Although studies have shown that decisions are taken in the brain before we are consciously aware of having taken them. So our consciousness is justifying the decisions already taken. OFC the decisions may have been made in a 'quantum uncertainty' type way before we post justify them.

[@J4CKWR4TH]

I believe this is the start of something truly wonderful ❤ Thanks for sharing!

[@Salcifer]

Reminds me a lot of the book “The Rainbow and the Worm” by Mae-Wan Ho, that cellular biology is a path toward deeper understandings in physics because cells utilize and organize around energy gradients not easily apparent to us. But it would make sense that cellular functions would prioritize minuscule amounts of energy and then evolve to utilize the macro environment, and the way it does it would preserve the function of those quantum structures.

[@LuisAldamiz]

That's indeed true for photosynthesis, for the proton-gradient "mills" and many many other cellular processes, which work at the near-atomic scale of things. So no wonder there's still so much to learn at this junction of biology and physics.

[@captcruel]

" not easily apparent to us" this phrase bears repeating!! How many times.......

[@mikemondano3624]

Nothing "evolves to" anything. Evolution is a completely random and purposeless process.

[@donnievance1942]

@@captcruel Hossenfelder needs to absorb the meaning of that phrase as much as anybody.

[@djgrumpygeezer1194]

Right on! “Life is water’s quantum jazz.!” Wonderful, eye-opening book.

[@carlbrenninkmeijer8925]

I was self concious when I tunneled between two parts of Hamburg, until I saw the UV blue light of a police car.

[@jamesdriscoll_tmp1515]

As Steve Miller once sang, "Woke up in arms of a big ole cop Police station, next stop"

[@abhinavmenon9140]

Creepy

[@steffenbendel6031]

I drive mostly subconsciously. And when I talk while driving, I always miss the exit.

[@Nulley0]

That's why blue light filter exists

[@maxtheflyingdutchman23]

But when they measured your speed they didnt know where you were

[@aletheia161]

Love your work Sabine. Roger makes the point that he only has something to say about the "understanding" part of consciouness. The quantum part is important because it enables probabilistic supra neuronic firing beyond the scope of the merely classically deterministically computable firing of neurons. I remember years ago a study showed that the "decision" to fire a neuron was made long before it fired. This was taken as definitive evidence of neural determinism. However, if(and it's a big if) the microtubules do act as suspected, maybe this early "decision" was the collapse of the wave function .

[@Yoyoubie]

c'était très interessant, merci Sabine

[@brettturley1940]

That was the absolute smoothest slide into advertising. I didn’t even mind. Maybe my microtubules aren’t super radiating.

[@tristanotear3059]

I agree. What made it so smooth was that I agreed with what she was saying about the benefits of language learning. If you know two languages, you have two different ways of looking at the world. That’s why learning a foreign language should never be supplanted with translation apps on your phone.

[@almightysapling]

IMO her transitions are about that smooth more often than not. Quite impressive really

[@DeVibe.]

I smelled the trick, and I stopped the video immediately.

[@marcjames3487]

@@tristanotear3059 I love your idea that each language is a different way of viewing the world - or of being in another world. I've been learning Spanish then just for fun added Russian and French. It seems we have a universal language learning mechanism that just gets better the more it's used.

[@ericbunker6242]

​@@marcjames3487It also works better the younger you are when you learn languages. Have schools start in kindergarten?

[@cottawalla]

There's a video posted several years ago by a well known science and respected British KZbinr, who's name I can't recall right now, showcasing research that describes how some species of birds use quantum effects to navigate.

[@judewarner1536]

Yes, I remember that one, too.

[@0ooTheMAXXoo0]

Our sense of smell needs quantum effects to work. Photosynthesis needs quantum effects and the magnetic navigation in birds does need quantum effects to work...

[@j3kfd9j]

@@0ooTheMAXXoo0 It's almost as if quantum effects are real and can be exploited by evolution just like the other properties of matter!

[@tw8464]

Exactly

[@tw8464]

Thank you for bringing this up. It is more evidence of quantum effects in cognition. I don't know why supposed "science hardliners" are so quick to dismiss the basic idea or evidence of quantum effects in cognition so quickly out of hand altogether. It is NOT actually a "way far out there crazy 'unscientific'" way of thinking or looking into consciousness as they seem to be trying to make it out to be.

[@willparry4775]

Thanks for this. I've been trying to understand his theory for years. Now I have a very basic grasp.

[@jenxsj3902]

I like your channel so much although I must confess I am not bright enough to understand most of it, I still learn something, thank you.

[@CatsAreRubbish]

Imagine a follow-up paper in the near future... "Aluminium foil head coverings help protect the brain's microtubules from outside quantum interference"

[@sageinit]

Nope, gotta use wire mesh, as shown by Allan H. Frey in 1969. Aluminium foil actually makes it worse, as some MIT people have shown a few years ago

[@dustinbrueggemann1875]

@@sageinit You need the reflecting surface to be a fully encapsulating suit. Even mesh will reflect waves larger than the spacing, and its the reflection of waves entering from the "open" side that creates that increased intensity.

[@prof.bizzarro]

One of the best comments ever! ❤

[@GrandAncientOak]

Headwear/crowns are clearly important when you look at ancient cultures (such as Buddhist and Hindu) who had this quantum knowledge thousands of years ago. The people are often depicted wearing headwear that looks very technological some with wires even coning out.

[@DharmaJannyter]

@@sageinit Why not both? 😁

[@damianlewis7550]

Andrea Liu’s recent work on protein inferencing implies that we really are inference machines all the way down. Add to that quantum inferencing within the brain and you get a multi-level reflexive inferencing system that is causally connected with physical reality. Maybe this really is the root of consciousness. Embodiment within physical reality and quantum active inferencing to predict, learn from and reflect on external and internal states from which a sense of self emerges. Who the hell knows? It looks a lot like what a definition of consciousness would be.

[@Theone-ou2xt]

Theoretical and experimental verification of a theory explaining consciousness will help us so much ,it will also help in filtering in or out the consciousness based interpretation of Quantum mechanics .Plus maybe if consciousness have quantum origin the most exciting Question to get answer is the question of death - does our consciousness survives death of physical body ? if yes then how ,what is the mechanism ?

[@nathanaelhahn4795]

That transition to advertisement was smooth as butter imo 👏👏👏

[@bobreynolds6587]

I have read and re-read The Emperor's new Mind and was always fascinated by the section on consciousness and its origins. As you would expect, Penrose's arguments are exhaustive and persuasive and he did convince me that consciousness is not a computable phenomenon. At the time he wrote the book, he was not saying it definitely arises from quantum effects in micro tubules, only that it was something to investigate. And, of course, It goes without saying that he is light years from being stupid.

[@mangalvnam2010]

Penrose wrote a follow-up or sequel to TENM called Shadows of The Mind, and there he delves more deeply into the issues left just barely sketched in the previous book.

[@dnrcstr]

Followed yet again by another book titled _Beyond the Doubting of a Shadow_ (1996)

[@MitchellPorter2025]

I think Hameroff read that book and wrote to Penrose saying, I know where the quantum effects happen!

[@mangalvnam2010]

@@dnrcstr Did not know about that one. What shows that his research about this question was a very carefully and extensively thougth-out one. Still, as he himself surely knows, everything in the end boils down to the results of testing the predictions of the Orch-OR model through microtubulinic decoherential proto-conscious pulses.

[@Mattje8]

I’m not sure it really matters (well ok it does but bear with me…) if the effects are quantum or some as yet undiscovered anything, nor if it is in micro tubules or elsewhere (though I would be as happy as anyone to see him proven right). The really big point is the incomputability of consciousness, and the implications of that for AI in particular. Consider, if you will, that there are some AI scientists now claiming that they “think” parts of the brain “might” behave like transformers. Anyone who mocked Penrose should give that evidence-free nonsense a good hard look. To give someone in the field of AI their credit, at least the Google guys say straight out “we aren’t trying to copy the brain, we are just trying to mimic what the brain produces”. Or words to that effect. To be more specific re AI - Skynet isn’t coming any time soon. So relax, unless you work in writing advertising copy because those guys are f*%^ed.

[@damien847]

“Tubes all the way down, people” 🤣🤣🤣 I can’t even…

[@mikemondano3624]

Yes, but under the tubes is still a turtle.

[@damien847]

👍 sure thing.

[@koyha5266]

What's so funny about that? Not trolling, serious question.

[@damien847]

Turtles. MikeMondano’s comment. There was a Speaker talking about Earth and what was beneath it and someone said, “A turtle.” The Speaker asked, “What’s the turtle standing on?” The person replied, “It’s turtles all the way down.”

[@rabidL3M0NS]

You tube!

[@MrSubstanz]

This is big news! I've dug into Hameroff's and Penrose's ideas just a couple of weeks ago, so this theory is still fresh for me. Great to hear that there is independent research pointing in a similar direction. On the other hand, if this is both key to consciousness and applicable to computation, sky net is just around the corner... D:

[@janerussell3472]

Microtubules are not to be confused with the myelin sheaf, which we learned about in the film Lorenzo's Oil. In oligodendrocytes,* microtubules can be classified as radial, which are near cell bodies and extend toward the axon, or lamellar, which initiate farther away from the cell bodies and spiral around the myelin sheath. These radial microtubules contribute to myelin elongation. *Oligodendrocytes generate and maintain myelin, increasing the speed and efficiency of axonal signal conduction and contributing to the structure and maintenance of the ensheathed axons.

[@richardgomes5420]

Before saying that anything causes consciousness, it would be pretty useful to have a solid definition about what it is.

[@schmetterling4477]

It's qualia.

[@McDonaldsCalifornia]

Also like free will right?

[@cdunne1620]

.. yes but you would first have to show that a language based definition is appropriate. There are premises in the language process that require the assumption of subject-object which is fine for describing a chair for example but may be entirely inappropriate for other observed or experienced phenomena. This problem reminds me of Godel’s ideas where a system of consistent logic cannot prove it’s own consistency. So is it possible to observe without splitting into subject-object. The answer is YES. You will have to read up on Jiddhu Krishnamurti’s writings on the process of thought. He had some dialogues with David Bohm the physicist, very interesting!

[@Fr00stee]

consciousness: the state of being awake and aware of one's surroundings.

[@chappie3642]

And what does "aware" mean?​@@Fr00stee

[@dennisestenson7820]

Chlorophyll molecules in every green cell in every green plant work by quantum effects. Why is it so difficult to concede that brains leverage quantum effects as well?

[@certifiedday1]

Precisely

[@GoatOfTheWoods]

yes!

[@user-ml4wm7ut5t]

There are probably a whole host of biological processes that take advantage of quantum effects were not even aware of yet. It's probably just the tip of the iceberg. Kind of like when they found one extraterrestrial planet decades ago and now they're finding billions. In time we'll likely uncover a whole universe of things going on, especially in neural cells.

[@squamish4244]

Because that's too personal and asks questions about our own identity, and that's scary.

[@DinoDiniProductions]

All chemical reactions work by quantum effects. Semiconductors work by quantum effects. We are trying to build quantum computers that use quantum effects. They problem is actually the fear that nature made quantum computers first. Yes, that’s how nuts we are as a species.

[@tsmith3286]

Coincidently or not yesterday I was thinking about the Penrose video where he discusses conscientiousness and it's possible relationship to microtubules. This led me to recall a book I read many years ago by Deepak Chopra and his commenting about the origin of thought and were thoughts actually originate from. Something as simple as grabbing a pen has to start from somewhere but where ? It's almost as if there is a man behind the curtain guiding us which then brings up the subject of free will.

[@michaelshannon6134]

I wish scientists would stop using the word "consciousness" in this context. The logical gap between this hypothesis and an explanation of consciousness is really just a philosophical problem called the "explanatory gap". There really is a good argument that consciousness *cannot* be explained by physical processes; and this usually leads to dualism or a rejection of the existence of consciousness, at least in the way we normally think of it. An explanation of consciousness is a philosophical problem and I think its out of the domain of many scientists; so when they invoke the word "consciousness" they are either out of their wheelhouse or they are better off using a word like "cognition" which describes something different.

[@Mattje8]

There is no logical gap - Penrose has been very clear that he believes we simply don’t have the physics to explain it yet. He’s also been fairly consistent in stating that quantum theory is incomplete and setting out why.

[@Vito_Tuxedo]

Agreed. It is presumptuous of Sabine to impute a "logical gap" to Sir Roger's hypothesis simply because she cannot perceive the connection between non-computability and the emergent phenomenon we call consciousness. It's typical, really; she's coming from physics, the science of simple systems, whose behavior can be modeled by finite algorithms. Complex systems don't work that way, and Sir Roger gets that. Evidently, Sabine doesn't. That became clear to me when she became alarmed by the predictions of the climate catastrophists. They insist that "The Science" is settled, and will brook no questioning of their self-proclaimed authority. But the truth is that predictions made by the models are completely unreliable. They don't agree with each other, because they can't agree with reality. They're epistemologically bankrupt. Climate is a complex system; it can't be accurately modeled by finite algorithms. The same is true for consciousness, the defining function of the human mind. *_Of course_* it's non-computable. Physics can't explain it because it's not what physics does. We need a genuine theory of complex systems, and at present we're a long way from an integrated knowledge structure of that kind.

[@coolmagoolsnexus]

It has to be incomplete. The incompleteness is the probability and redundancy built into reality that gives rise to the phenomenon of Emergence. I highly recommend Terrance Deacon's book (Incomplete Nature) for a detailed account of the counter-intuitive process of Emergence.

[@blizzard1198]

​@@coolmagoolsnexus what do you like about emergence?

[@solsystem1342]

​​@@Vito_Tuxedo That's a lot of points but I feel like you're missing the most crucial issue. We have two observed facts about reality 1) humans are conscious and 2) the human mind is not computable. Until you can establish a causal link between the two you can't draw any conclusions on whether or not one causes the other. In effect, you are the one trying to ignore possibilities because it's entirely possible consciousness could have nothing to do with quantum effects with our current data. It can be hard to sit back and admit that we are as of yet unsure. It could be that quantum effects create consciousness but we don't know that yet. Also, complexity does not equate to unpredictability. How chaotic a system is is separate from complexity. A double pendulum can be extremely chaotic with a simple system and yet the movement of the bodies of the solar system can be predicted hundreds of thousands of years into the future despite being unarguably a more complex system. Another good example are weather forecasts. The 7 day prediction is proof that we can (to some degree) predict the likely weather patterns. The climate of a whole planet for decades to come is in some sense more complicated but, it's less chaotic than weather since we're taking averages. We certainly need more study to produce more accurate models but they aren't inherently less predictable than whether it will rain in a month.

[@drkcobra]

When Roger Penrose says something, it probably isn't crazy even if it sounds like it. He certainly has thought it through.

[@squamish4244]

Penrose is called a genius even by his critics. He's probably one of the smartest people alive. He basically kick-started the modern field of consciousness studies with The Emperor's New Mind in 1989.

[@Primitarian]

@@squamish4244 Great book.

[@famailiaanima]

Until it is

[@heliboy8762]

He's not immune from a bit of magical thinking from time to time. He promotes a hypothesis in cosmology (cyclical universe) which is every bit as unverifiable and unfalsifiable as string theory. Still, his contributions to physics in general are unassailable.

[@millwrightrick1]

Never bet against Roger Penrose. Brilliant in physics and in mathematics. As for a cyclic universe, a system that cycles is easier to create than a system that goes through one cycle and stops.

[@Padraigp]

I remember that and somethinf about leaves using something similar in making energy. Something about the light does something odd inside a leaf like goes ahead in time or causality or something.

[@andriyandriychuk]

He is also right about CCC model of the Universe.

[@AdastraRecordings]

I literally mouthed "they'll want to use it for quantum computing" with you. Crazy

[@digitalnomad9985]

Entanglement?

[@icecl0ud]

Beat me by 7 minutes.

[@friend7535]

@@digitalnomad9985 Superradiance

[@ovidiudans]

Room temperature...hmm

[@ncedwards1234]

Spontaneous synchronization?

[@AlpacaMaBags]

I heard Penrose speak of this years ago (seems like it, at least). Even though I'll never be qualified enough to evaluate his theories, I really appreciate his approach to these topics, meaning topics at the frontier of science. He always starts his thought process at his expertise (in his case the math), works his way down and then makes a prediction or builds a model that is very intuitive and could work within his field of expertise. He seems very Einsteinian in that way. His belief in the conformal universe comes to mind. Doesn't mean he'll be proven right on all accounts though, but I really appreciate how practical he thinks about these topics, especially from a testability perspective. Feels like he goes out of his way to come up with new ways to think about these problems and also comes up with ways to actually test or prove/disprove these ideas.

[@thegrumpydeveloper]

This explains more about how something could evolve outside conscious thought. Desire or observation might explain how a need eventually evolves in time in addition to and not in contrast to natural selection. To me evolving a poison or colourful feathers seems hard to just appear but if a more powerful desire to actualization mechanism appeared perhaps…

[@BarryHochfield]

Mega exciting stuff. If this is truly a breakthrough then room temperature quantum computing is around the corner. Wow!

[@alieninmybeverage]

Consciousness, and other topics like the initial conditions of the universe, are basically Rorschach tests. Any evidence that seems like confirmation of a theory is basically the bias you take with you. If you find consciousness weird and mysterious, and you find quantum to be weird and mysterious, then the link is general but intuitive. If you find questions of conscious or quantum underpinnings unnecessary, then that is general and intuitive. Bias is all anyone has when at the edge of possible evidence. Maybe that is okay.

[@juimymary9951]

I agree with you, but I am not sure wether or not it is okay, bias can make you develop a closed mindedness that is unbecoming of a scientist

[@alieninmybeverage]

@juimymary9951 there is no way to be free of bias, there are only ways to be aware and compensate for them.

[@juimymary9951]

@@alieninmybeverage good point actually, I wholeheartedly agree

[@nuklearboysymbiote]

​@@juimymary9951 it's not closemindedness. Remember that the topic at hand is when you are researching new science. It's just that if you are focused on researching one specific theory, you should give it your all in order to see what happens, instead of suddenly swapping to working on a new theory when someone suggests it💜hope that makes sense

[@jth4242]

My bias is to think linking two things just because they are both mysterious is retarded.

[@DrDeuteron]

A meme of the 1970's SF punk band "The Tubes" would have been gold, or George Carlin deconstructing "down the tubes"...."What tubes? Where are these tubes?"

[@nsbd90now]

White Punks on Dope are so... quantum. lol!

[@dustinbreithaupt9331]

"And why is there more than one?"

[@jamesdriscoll_tmp1515]

@@nsbd90now I can't clean up, but I know I should.

[@jakeaurod]

"We ain't got tube one."

[@baomao7243]

Microtubule? “She’s a Beauty…” 🎶🎵

[@elginscodex]

I wonder what that discovery may mean for the future of quantum computing, as producing these microtubule structures may help us miniaturise the technology as we progress our understanding of quantum computing

[@mathieug6136]

I've been a fan of the theory since his emperor's new mind book in early 2000s. Another interesting finding regarding this theory is that psychedelics were recently found out to rely on an "internal receptor" rather than on the classicly associated 5ht2a serotonin receptor. Microtubules being built with tubuline, which is itself chemically quite close to tryptophan (the serotonin precursor) and psychedelics such as lsd, psylocybin and dmt, one can imagine microtubules signaling being altered in a particular way by those molecules, given rise to the mind revealing properties.

[@platypusrex2287]

I like how consciousness is judged and we don't even know what it is....

[@DJAYPAZ]

Agreed.

[@ari1234a]

Do we know what gravity is ? People use gravity and its effects although we don't even know what it is....

[@atari7001]

@@ari1234atime dilation occurs due to relativistic effects of an object traveling at high velocity. Time dilation is a characteristic of gravitational fields. So, it stands to reason that space itself is in motion when in a gravitational “field”. Just in case you were curious

[@ari1234a]

@@atari7001 Hmmm yes that is true, but.... We do not have unifying theory of General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. We lack the understanding of how to predict gravity's behavior under certain conditions: at high energies, on tiny scales, near singularities, or when dealing with the inherent quantum nature of particles. Similarly, our comprehension is limited when it comes to the behavior of any potential quantum field underlying gravity, under any circumstances.

[@marvinmartian8746]

THIS - 100% As in, it's not even defined well. Every definition I read is mostly about 'being aware.' Then my mind goes to thought experiments where I imagine when a baby becomes conscious (if that is even a real thing). Or if we have an AI at some point and is far passes the Turing test. Is that conscious? Then I go the other extreme and get all new-agey and say everything, every particle has a degree of consciousness (or other BS). Is it even a real thing or just a phycological construct, or language construct that we can't seem to get along without? This is when I give up and mostly fall back into the "it's not even a real thing" mode...

[@scytaleghola5969]

I'm not an expert, but I've read quite a bit on the hypothesis. It's not just the noncomputable quantum argument that Penrose and Hammeroff make. They also point out the effects of anesthesia on consciousness and correlate that to quantum effects from dampening.

[@raimo7310]

Penrose is a mind I admire so much, and to me this microtubules idea was always extremely intriguing. I love that there 'should' be the collapse of the wave function as a base for the theory, as odd as it overall sounds it's the one that always seemed the most 'likely' to me

[@p.bckman2997]

@@raimo7310 I think the two should read a bit of biology before making sweeping statements about how the brain works.

[@bovice5072]

@@p.bckman2997 Care to elaborate?

[@joalampela8612]

​@@p.bckman2997 Wild statement.

[@kael13]

@@p.bckman2997 Dumb thing to say.

[@ThePrimaFacie]

quality ad transition, I cant say much about the tubules tho. Thanks for the vid

[@f1am3d]

So, "AI" is actually not an "I".

[@c.r.k.7162]

Can you elaborate on that thought?

[@lisathomas1622]

Sabine ❤ I appreciate you doing this. Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts.

[@massimosilvetti]

Yesterday I disassembled my lawnmower. In the engine, there was a cylinder-shaped thing, the piston. I discovered it's great for driving nails like a hammer. I deduce the engine works thanks to the continuous hammering of nails.

[@herico33]

Sabine, as an programmer and computer nerd, gotta say I’ve always thought that our brains did have quantum capabilities and that Quantum Computers will be the norm in the next 20 years, and one of the things that I think is honestly holding us back is the materials used, we sure need to think out of the box. We can’t keep using the same materials to improve, it can only take us so far as physically possible, there’s obviously a hard limit, but we should look elsewhere and not stuck with the same old same old!

[@williampatrickfurey]

Theory here: There's studies showing that 600 nanometer red light interacts with cytochrome c oxidase to release mitochondrial nitric oxide so oxygen may bind to it and increase ATP by 16 fold (from 2-38). I'm considering how this might have been possible in nature; I've known that there are metal substrate flashlights, and a type of red florescent flourite that's only found in two parts of the world which seems to have this change due to some other elemental "impurities" reacting with UV light. My assumption is that the electrical signals within us could pass through some type of crystalline structure and give just enough of this light to elicit this effect.

[@Markhypnosis1]

It was actually Professor Stuart Hameroff who put the microtubule idea to Penrose. Then they both worked on the Orch-or theory.

[@TheRABIDdude]

That's precisely what she said in the video (except without name dropping Orchestrated Objective Reduction)

[@RJ-fg8kw]

My own wave function collapsed quite nicely a few times this morning while watching this video. The neurons were firing at a time when I'm struggling to get going. There was a lot to digest in this very short video, but I savored every bit of it. Thank you.

[@breakeverychain7]

Behold the sound of one hand clapping

[@EpicMiniMeatwad]

@@breakeverychain7 Man's facepalming quite vigorously

[@Noobinski]

Is 3:56 really the visualization of microtubules via a CAD of a six cylinder motor block? That is awesome!

[@adriendecroy7254]

the model of the brain at 3:52 looks suspiciously like a V6 engine. Love the Piaf reference.

[@cloud1stclass372]

Stuart Hammeroff sitting back in a quiet country side somewhere, smoking a cigar and laughing at all the naysayers.

[@GustavoOliveira-gp6nr]

Hahahah that really sounds like him!

[@JohnDoe-sp6wr]

One of my biggest gripes with Orch OR was that quantum effects inside microtubules were not even possible due to the way the tubulin lattice was arranged.

[@file83]

@@JohnDoe-sp6wrBut then, it was.

[@XxYwise]

“BING, motherfuckers! Hahahahahaha...” -Stu

[@MCsCreations]

Fascinating. Let's see what else they discover. 😊 Thanks, Sabine! Stay safe there with your family! 🖖😊

[@kateqaysaneah5979]

You’re too funny I love your channel checking out this book!!!

[@kristinesynowka106]

As soon as Sabine mentioned how unusual it would be to find quantum effects at room temperature I immediately thought of iridoplasts. These are modified chloroplasts found in a lab grown culture of a Begonia pavonina hybrid and they have the quantum effect of slowing down certain wavelengths of light. It's an adaptation that helps the plant create more energy under the dense rainforest canopy. It also has the side effect of making the leaves reflect blue light and gives the plant an amazing peacock-like iridescence under certain lighting. I wouldn't be surprised if we find more examples of quantum effects in structures created by biological life. Nature has had a very long time to experiment.

[@evinnra2779]

Maybe I misunderstood the lectures and explanations of Sir Roger Penrose on KZbin, but I don't believe he claimed it anywhere that these microtubules create consciousness. What I managed to understand was that the microtubules participate in us having an experience of consciousness, but consciousness it self is just there to be participated in for organisms specialising in that activity.

[@mangalvnam2010]

Penrose claim that the orchestrated collapses of quantum states of the tubulins in the microtubules are pulses of proto-consciousness. What the brain does with these pulses, through interactions among parts of the tubules and through the neuronal synapses they feed, and through recording memory etc., that is what still very mysteriously produce consciousness. The tubulins and their quantum pulses are just like the sparkplugs of it!

[@AaronSapiens]

It's tubes all the way down people... This was one of the most entertaining videos you've made. And very fascinating as a graduate of biomedical sciences.

[@mikemondano3624]

I didn't realize that the turtle story was so well-known.

[@AaronSapiens]

@@mikemondano3624 I never read it; there's a movie too. But it is pretty big.

[@vladimirseven777]

Wave function was a workaround for people that was unable to imagine particle as cloud. By multiplying workarounds you really can go far away.

[@MikeyJ1572]

I always thought quantum mechanics worked really well for explaining certain aspects of consciousness like free will because of the fact that quantum mechanics is probabilistic instead of deterministic.

[@josemaldonado2844]

Neuroscientist here. I bet that when I talk about physics I sound as fantastical as Penrose does when he talks about neuroscience.

[@martymcfly1776]

As a physicist I believe that Quantum Mechanics is real. I lot of people don't, but that's their problem, not mine. I admit that I know very little about how the brain functions but to me it would be an absurd notion to think that quantum mechanics would have nothing to do with it.

[@noggogo6932]

Try it.

[@subwayfacemelt4325]

Without physics, neuroscience is merely near-a-science...

[@isaacharton7851]

You wish, you just sound dull, likely.

[@HHercock]

Yes, you are correct. Here is the conclusion from a recent paper about 1cubic millimetre of temporal cortex tissue. Citation - Alexander Shapson-Coe et al. ,A petavoxel fragment of human cerebral cortex reconstructed at nanoscale resolution.Science384,eadk4858(2024). To fully understand how the human brain works, knowledge of its structure at high resolution is needed. Presented here is a computationally intensive reconstruction of the ultrastructure of a cubic millimeter of human temporal cortex that was surgically removed to gain access to an underlying epileptic focus. It contains about 57,000 cells, about 230 millimeters of blood vessels, and about 150 million synapses and comprises 1.4 petabytes. Our analysis showed that glia outnumber neurons 2:1, oligodendrocytes were the most common cell, deep layer excitatory neurons could be classified on the basis of dendritic orientation, and among thousands of weak connections to each neuron, there exist rare powerful axonal inputs of up to 50 synapses. Further studies using this resource may bring valuable insights into the mysteries of the human brain. Before we invoke universal consciousness theory, as does Donald Hoffman et al. or the Quantum affects as Penrose et al. do, we must understand the physical stuff between our ears. When we are in that position and still looking for answers, then we can justify a look at this fringe material.

[@milaberdenisvanberlekom4615]

I know it's just a small thing but that segway to the sponsor was incredible 😂

[@Blaisem]

segue

[@EinsteinsHair]

@@Blaisem ty, I don't remember this being a big problem, but suddenly, this is the third time in the past two weeks. The word was segue, the scooter people wanted to spell their brand differently

[@imaginative6315]

It wasn't

[@QUBIQUBED]

@@EinsteinsHair the inventor of the segway tragically died in 2013 by segwaying off the grand canyon while he wasnt paying attention

[@mikemondano3624]

@@QUBIQUBED It appears our OP may have fallen off one as well.

[@suan22]

3:09 "I've met both Penrose and Hameroff and they're both crazy of course" 😄

[@Ramkumar-uj9fo]

Thanks for making this Sabine. Watching

[@LynxUrbain]

If I'm not mistaken, these microtubules have various functions in most of the living world. That's why I don't understand the shortcut between their supposed “quantum effect” and human consciousness. But perhaps the study goes much deeper than the content presented in the video. Before looking at “quantum effects”, in the human brain, we could start by looking at such effects in other roles involving these microtubules (cell mobility, mitosis, ...). Starting with “simple” eukaryotic cells. Then, if we're interested in the nervous system or the brain, these functions exist in thousands of vertebrates, ..... not only human beings.

[@paulc285]

It comes down to Determinism vs. Free Will. At a higher level of abstraction - Game Theory necessitates random strategies in Nash Equilibrium, i.e. indeterminism. Game Theory is the basis of Evolutionary Biology, so a priori, it is reasonable to think that all life should have the ability to generate randomness. Random strategies, are not computable. If you were able to compute the evolutionary strategy in non-cooperative games, then you would no longer have Nash Equilibrium in Mixed-Strategies. A reasonable counter-argument is that pseudo-randomness would only need to be sufficiently expensive to deter computation (e.g. traditional cryptography). Although I would argue it would be more bizarre for a snake to have a cryptographic hashing function in its brain than to just rely on the randomness all around us. When you start dealing with sufficiently sophisticated actors, they have the freedom to choose to entangle their strategies in exogenous, genuinely random, quantum effects. Thus when you start to consider financial markets, there is no reason to doubt the random-walk hypothesis. Casinos, for example, rely on genuine random number generation.

[@zagyex]

Good point. Of course the research goes deeper. A claim by Hameroff is that single cell organisms with no synapses perform purposeful intelligent functions using their cytoskeletal microtubules (mating, learning, etc) Another claim, and prob the main one is that general anesthetic drugs that switch off consciousness act on microtubules. Hameroff is an anesthesiologist.

[@0ooTheMAXXoo0]

@@paulc285 Game theory has been denounced by its author. Who cares what a failed theory says? Every talk about game theory is about how nonsensical of a theory it is and how crazy that people used to place faith in it in the past...

[@kurhooni5924]

Merci pour vos vidéos :)

[@meeduoh]

The link between consciousness and quantum effects is not as far fetched as it's made up to be here. It has to do with the observation that conscious phenomena appear " all bundled together" in a seemingly single plane of experience, an observation that reaches back all the way back to Descartes, Hume, and more recently Brentano. Descartes postulated that consciousness was accomplished by a single point in the brain, in the pineal gland. Most neuropsychologists would now disagree with the cartesian model. The regions responsible for consciousness seem instead distributed all across the brain. The problem that arises is that a computational, and hence local model cannot account for conscious phenomena appearing "together" under the assumption that these conscious informations are distributed all across the brain. We need some form of non-local explanation for consciousness if we don't want to go back to Descartes

[@minhm7764]

Thanks for the interesting science videos!

[@SabineHossenfelder]

Thanks from the entire team!

[@AquarianSoulTimeTraveler]

​@@SabineHossenfelderI can verify that at least subjectively for my experience I am able to tap into the subconscious mind and if I'm standing next to you near you in your presence I will be able to predict everything you will say before you say it and say it in the exact same time as you in mannerisms without talking... its scary. I can do this with almost anyone who's talking to me if I focus out on it...

[@AquarianSoulTimeTraveler]

​@@SabineHossenfelderi can so this technique with wireless signals and be faster then the cellphone can decode and display the signal on the screen so i can actively speak and predict faster then you are saying it on my phone whereas best i can do in reality is realtime speed...

[@FunFindsYT]

@@AquarianSoulTimeTraveler Respectfully, go see a psychiatrist.

[@AquarianSoulTimeTraveler]

@@FunFindsYT I scare them with logic... My words are a dangerous weapon... When you know what I know it's Way Beyond a Psychiatrist... ok other version of WE in the kaleidoscope reality... Enjoy the temporary separation Because all the Singularity Aka the Big Bang Aka God. All encompassing and completely alone... Just know that hole on the inside of you is never able to be filled with Consumer goods or anything else It is the hole of being completely alone and all encompassing. Embrace this and Represent Selflessism, one for all but never all for one... its logical cold and calculating. Green Represents the now or the flow... Stay in the green looking to the ultraviolet or purple which represents the future unity between the red (which is the passion-past-negative) and the Blue which is the positive but not as powerful as when positive is passionate! This is unity! This is the ultraviolet and green machine, from which all can be made! Just remember if you follow the logical progression of the spatial Dimensions if a fourth spatial Dimension exists then infinite three-dimensional spatial potentiality must exist and therefore a infinite Multiverse must exist... remember infinite three-dimensional spatial potentiality can stack into any size four dimensional existence so therefore if we are not the highest fundamental spatial Dimension we would expect to see the relative state or shape of the universe as flat which we do observe and the proof of Mandela effects shows Universe switching and proves higher spatial dimensional existence...

[@mielivalta]

I remember and have been vocal about it for quite some time. It clicked together when I heard about Sir Roger Penrose's thoughts about consciousness. I always felt something was off about discussions about consciousness. That the ghosts of behaviorism and dualism were haunting behind every theory. I really wish I could talk with Roger in real life. I got so many questions.

[@MyName-tb9oz]

The mechanists don't want to believe Penrose and claim he's using 'magical' thinking because they are terrified to admit that we, as a species, hardly know anything about anything and they definitely want to believe that the universe is predictable and orderly. It's mostly a religious debate and I'm on the side of Penrose.

[@mielivalta]

@@MyName-tb9oz I was subtly referring to this with the dualism. You just said it more frankly.

[@jaz4742]

​@MyName-tb9oz thats exactly it. Magic isnt real its all physics, weird to humans or not. Calling it magical thinking is a cultish ego thing.

[@_boraprogramar]

@@MyName-tb9oz I think the same way, i mean like, even stars need the quantum tunneling effect to exist why not the brain being much more complex and small than a star will sure have some quantum to explain it

[@mangalvnam2010]

I think that you could extract much of use and profit from reading a book called "The Imaginary Institution of Society", by some greek philosopher and psychoanalist named Cornelius Castoriadis, for there he presents a very intringuing view about the development of the human mind, starting from a freudian basis but going way beyond it. Among the maaaaaaany books I've already read, that's the one I see as the most enlightening ever. The curiousest thing is this: the human mind is not even the main theme of that book of his, he just kind of incidentally parse through the issue of how our human minds form up from early "monadical" babyhood to adult fully socialized life.

[@therealkillerb7643]

I hit the like button, even though I didn't understand anything; being a Liberal Arts major and all. But she seems like a nice lady and very sincere in what she is saying. She's also the funniest physicist I have ever seen - so there's that.

[@miketuton9268]

Transition into the babel ad was smoooooove.

[@megamillionfreak]

Hameroff is not a "neurobiologist". It's much better than that: he is a physician, and an anesthesiologist at that (and a professor of anesthesiology and psychology, recently retired). He stops and restarts consciousness in patients - using gases.

[@XCSme]

Oh , no, I have gasses, will he stop my consciousness?

[@ralphmacchiato3761]

No, he's merely performing his part in the sea of dominoes.

[@andrewharvey4958]

Has anybody done experiments on the interaction of tubulin with known anaesthetics?

[@megamillionfreak]

@@XCSme Please forgive me, I speak and write immigrant English.

[@megamillionfreak]

@@andrewharvey4958 Listening to Hameroff's various talks (on youtube), I can't but think all anesthesia is is exactly that.

[@LEEgner]

Jesus, first the gut bacteria and now this. Every year, being a behavioral researcher becomes harder and harder

[@seDrakonkill]

Rip you lmao

[@peterbreis5407]

Not exactly my words but my explanation of the fundamental base randomness of physics, life and human thinking. Why everything is not uniform or totally predictable.

[@supersmily5811]

That could be huge. As you guessed, it sounds like a perfect medium to base room temp quantum computing off of! It'd have to be changed to be inorganic of course, but we do that all the time.

[@puddintame7794]

Once the easy is known only the seemingly impossible is left.

[@floretionguru2977]

I don't see how you can get people to agree that this has a specific effect on consciousness as long as people can't agree on a specific definition of consciousness.

[@AndrewBrownK]

yeah they refuse to give a practical definition on purpose so they can cling to their spooks and haunts and ghosts. There is absolutely zero reason to say consciousness cannot or should not be computable unless you can bring a solid definition of consciousness to back it up.

[@ogi22]

As far as we know, quantum effects are governed by probablility. So they are not computable as Penrose described it. This is the first proof that brain is not deterministic. And that's huge. Regardless of how we describe consciousness.

[@mariolawrence897]

What you say at 5:10 is the catch. And it's a VERY BIG catch. If someone can bridge that gap theoretically and experimentally... that would be a LIFE-changing discovery. Literally.

[@schmetterling4477]

How so? The judge would still fine you or send you to jail, despite your claim that your microtubuli were in superposition when you ran that light in a drunk stupor. :-)

[@lemineftali]

I’ve always leaned heavily towards determinism, but if there is any free will to be found in my world, it would be from the “randomness” of quantum mechanics. This opens a few doors for me.

[@japaneselie]

It was Biocentrism that introduced me to Roger Penrose theories on Microtubules many years ago. And yes, before you all jump down my throat, I know that Lanza seems to jump to a lot of conclusions and I agree with you but as the years have passed some of the ideas Lanza has postulated have resonated with me. I scoffed at his ideas and methods (if you can call them that) at first but I now lean towards the idea that the universe that we perceive does not reflect the reality of the space we are inhabiting.

[@joshuaobrien6137]

The lex friedman podcast had a philosopher of science on discussing that, namely that if you believe in evolution, by its very nature you must also believe that we do not see reality for what it is and cannot see it for what it is because we have only evolved to reproduce and survive and so anything outside of those parameters(which would be about 99.9% of reality) would be evolutionarily pointless and so we would never evolve to recognize it or to even be able to interact with it. So their is a logical basis for that kind of thinking. I wish I could remember the guys name it was a fascinating podcast.

[@japaneselie]

@@joshuaobrien6137 I'm not religious at all but I now suspect intelligent design of some type or another is in play in our universe. There are simply too many interacting complexities that evolution currently can't explain and probably never will. Are we in some type of simulation? I used to scoff at this question but I now find myself coming back to the answer " yes, I think it's likely".

[@joshuaobrien6137]

@@japaneselie I am not religious either, as for intelligent design I don't know, I think the human brain is simply not designed to understand such a thing. I think that once we have the mental capacity to actually understand what god is(both in term and in actuality if he does in fact exist), we will realize our definition is so overly simplified as to be woefully inadequate. That said I am reminded of a quote from Roger Bacon, "Small amounts of philosophy lead a man to atheism, large amounts lead a man back to god.". Probably why I'm agnostic, its just too complex a universe for me to say one way or another.

[@japaneselie]

@@joshuaobrien6137 As one agnostic to another, I suspect we have similar ways of thinking. I don't think we will ever know the true substance of our universe for that very reason, our brains are for living in it and not standing outside looking in. That Bacon quote has always made me ponder things a little deeper but for the record, it was Francis Bacon, not Roger.🙂

[@joshuaobrien6137]

@@japaneselie Yeah it was, I don't know why but I always say roger when I mean Francis. But yes I agree.

[@stanislavbutsky8432]

Yevgeny Slyadnikov from Tomsk University built a simplified model of microtubule as a lattice of quantum entangled pairs and that lattice being mostly filled with 'noise' contains also an organized zones with a 'weaves' that store information. These 'weaves' allow microtubule to recognize an incoming EM-signal patterns changing its conductivity by a few orders of magnitude so in case of successful recognition the microtubule becomes almost superconductive for a short time. The brain doesn't compute - it creates and recognizes the signal patterns for images, sounds, smells etc.

[@VidkunQL]

How complex are the "patterns" in his model? If they are not too complicated, then he should be able to show in the laboratory that a microtubule can act as an antenna.

[@kennethferland5579]

Your Buzz word salad need some more Corpo flavorings like 'Disruptive', 'Inovators', and 'Revolutionize' in order to attract enough VC money.

[@flowinsounds]

its weird that people object so hard to brain structures doing what modern self correcting qc systems do. The logical next step is that we produce conscious machines when we add self correcting qbits to our LLMs

[@gregorygant4242]

Actually is does compute but that is a small portion of what it actually does it does much much more than that!

[@pierrotA]

I'm surprised of your tone. Tons of people are searching how it work but you seem to be certain you know. "The brain do not compute - it create and recognize patterns" How is that different of the way AI work ? Do you say AI do not compute either ?

[@jasonkocher3513]

I like where this is headed, specifically the "non-computable" part of consciousness. Very similar to the idea that a true random number cannot be computed in an algorithm alone; it needs some random external seed source.

[@NightmareCourtPictures]

It’s nonsense. If universe is non computable it implies hyper computation exists. We don’t live in a universe where the halting problem is solvable. So “next question.” It’s very simple: systems, including QM are computable, just very complex. The brain having properties from QM level should be no surprise and fits right into everything (our brain is made of atoms and particles). The non computable part is just physics slop trying to save face.

[@slouch186]

whenever some new research comes out i always hope it will end up being important enough that someone will bother to make it make sense to me eventually

[@arctic_haze]

Very interesting. I am not sure about consciousness coming from quantum effects, but I'm pretty sure that photosynthesis is too effective not to be a quantum process. This is an old idea by me, already partly confirmed but in experiments not everyone agrees with.

[@jasonkinzie8835]

If true this would counter the argument that the brain is to hot and noisy to allow for quantum effects.

[@remo27]

@@jasonkinzie8835 I think there have been enough studies and observations of quantum effects in living systems to say that quantum is not automatically a no-go simply because an environment is warm and noisy - and that realization is itself a breakthrough.

[@Uhlbelk]

By "too effective" you mean, for the number of chemical bonds and the number of photons available, photosynthesis produces more interactions then would be predicted by standard quantum mechanics?

[@arctic_haze]

@Uhlbelk No, I looked into this from the electromagnetic radiation point of view. If you want to model the very high absorption of chlorophyll and how it scatters nonabsorbed light using Maxwell theory, you would need insane values of both real and imaginary refractive index (the latter is responsible for scattering). Almost like metal but absorbing instead of scattering. Many people tried that and failed. This suggests to me this is no classical electromagnetic phenomenon.

[@Uhlbelk]

@@arctic_haze I would guess that you are using simplified models that don't accurately represent the chlorophlasts. Do you have the appropriate lipid crystal latice of the membranes? The secondary and tertiary confirmational changes of all enzymes? I doubt it. Nature has had 2.4 bllion year to maximize the functionality of modern chloroplasts.