On his blog The Daily Dish, Andrew Sullivan posts an email from a reader who is doing research on "supranormal human experience" for an article in Discover magazine. In connection with Sullivan's dialogue with Sam Harris, the reader summarizes the recent work of physicist/mathematician Roger Penrose and his colleague anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff (which Lawson has mentioned here a few times, as I recall).
Excerpt: Together, Penrose and Hameroff have developed a theory of consciousness called ORCH OR (Orchestrated Objective Eduction of Quantum Coherence in Brain Microtubules) which posits that consciousness "occurs" not at the neuronal level in the brain, and not in algorithmic processes mimicking on a grand scale the way computers work, but at the sub-neuronal level, in the microtubles (crystal-like lattice structures that help organize cell structures and enable information processing) in which quantum processing interacts with classical physics. It's that intersect, between classical and quantum physics, to drastically over-simplify the Penrose/Hameroff model, that "provides the global binding necessary to consciousness." Why is this interesting? Two reasons: because it suggests that the brain functions not like a computer but in a non-computable (i.e. non- reproducible by artificial means) way, and because Penrose goes further, and theorizes a stable set of Platonic ideal structures residing at the very lowest energy level of the Planck scale (where quantum gravity, whatever that is, would be strongest), which inform and influence at least our unconscious minds. Because quantum mechanics allows for non-local patterns, and because these non-local patterns repeat everywhere, the implication is that the universe is in some way conscious, and that we are part of that consciousness. Read the whole post at: http://tinyurl.com/29dvyx
