Orchestrated objective reduction: what it is and what for

Orchestrated objective reduction: what it is and what for

As of today, we don’t know whether Penrose is right or wrong. But we might as well rely once again on the human genius to know where the right connection lies. The human genius has intuitively figured out a lot of things, and only later were these discoveries backed up with empirical data. At the end of the day, if you have other ways to explain consciousness, then please do.

07

06

But the question begs itself: do Dennett and his associates — neurobiologists along with other scientists — understand the essence of the problem of consciousness themselves? And does any of them know anything about quantum mechanics?

This structure may be anything, but at this point, from among what humanity has discovered, the most plausible explanation seems to be that something is happening in the brain microtubules at the level of non-computable quantum processing performed by qubits.

03

Daniel Dennett, a prominent neuroscientist, considers it utter arrogance and insolence that some physicists who don’t know a thing about neuroscience are going to explain consciousness — and that, to top it off, from the quantum point of view which no one understands. Those physicists don’t understand the essence of the problem, after all.

05

02

According to this theory, brain activity is considered as a largely quantum process. It is brain activity rather than consciousness (with consciousness being a part of it) that specifically represents a kind of quantum process, as it is not computational, or mathematical, or anything else. Consciousness is based on non-computable quantum processing performed by qubits formed collectively on cellular microtubules. This process is significantly amplified in neurons, which means something is happening even before the neurons, in a different structure.

04

Predictably enough, this theory has some equally prominent critics. For example, Stephen Hawking believed Penrose's thinking was fundamentally flawed. You can't just take Mystery 1, which is consciousness, and Mystery 2, which is quantum mechanics and quantum theory, and explain one through the other without understanding each individually.

08

Penrose's theory is appealing because it makes an attempt to describe a whole object. A correctly described whole is easier to study. Currently though, scientists study consciousness from different angles, as in the famous parable of the elephant.

Erwin Schrödinger, the founder of quantum mechanics, also spoke his mind about consciousness postulating that it is associated with a living biological substance. A living biological substance means the one with morphogenesis, with some kind of non-computerized memory design, and — a suggestion of our own — with some kind of internal mathematics, which can be conditionally called the language of thought. This is definitely not zeros and ones, which form the basis of modern computers, and not even weights, which essentially are the basis of modern AI.

09

It was following The Emperor's New Mind’s completion in the 90s that Penrose, together with Stuart Hameroff, a biologist and one of the founders of nanobiology, developed the Penrose – Hameroff theory of quantum neural computing. They named it orchestrated objective reduction (Orch OR).

01