Interviews with Hameroff: http://noetic.org/noetic/issue-thirteen-august/what-is-consciousness-hameroff/
http://www.skeptiko.com/stuart-hameroff-on-quantum-consciousness-and-singularity/ Excerpt from the first: *"Schlitz:* That brings up the criticism that the brain can’t be a quantum processor because it’s too wet or too warm or whatever the criticism happens to be. What I’m hearing you say is that, in your view, the brain can be a signaling processor for a kind of quantum field. How does that happen then? How do you bring microtubules into this idea of the brain as a quantum processor? *Hameroff: *First of all, what you said is exactly right. Most people do criticize the view that Roger Penrose and I came out with in 1995—that quantum computing and these microtubules inside brain neurons connect us to the fundamental level of the universe. They say, “Everybody know*s* that the brain is too warm, wet, and noisy to be a quantum computer.” They say this because of the problem technologists, engineers, and physicists face when trying to build quantum computers in a laboratory that will utilize these delicate quantum states. I should say a little bit about what that means: quantum superposition, where something can be in two states or places at the same time. When they try to do this with ions, individual atoms, or small particles, they run into the problem that any thermal vibration, any heat, will disrupt and destroy the quantum superposition and cause decoherence. And so to build a quantum computer in the laboratory and avoid the heat and the vibrations caused by the heat, they build them at absolute zero temperature. But biology has had billions of years to evolve mechanisms to avoid decoherence, and, more importantly, it’s probable that biology has developed mechanisms to use the heat to drive coherence like a laser. A laser is a quantum device; it uses heat not to destroy quantum coherence but to pump it. And so we—and a lot of people—think that biology uses heat and ambient energy to *drive* quantum coherence, not destroy it. Recent evidence in the last five or six years has come down pretty strongly on our side. For example, it’s been discovered that photosynthesis—the operation in all plants that give rise to our food, to everything we eat—utilizes quantum coherence. The photons from the sun are collected in one part of the cell and conveyed to another part of the cell to be made into chemical energy. This conductance of energy from point A to point B utilizes quantum coherence in ambient temperatures. If this happens in something as fundamental as photosynthesis, then it’s likely to be found throughout biology. And more importantly to our case, a fellow in Japan named Anirban Bandyopadhyay—it’s a hard name to say, but I think he’ll be quite famous within a few years—recently found that when vibrated at the right frequency, microtubules become quantum devices. And when that work comes out—Bandyopadhyay is presently writing it— it’s going to blow this field wide open."
