Fringe-ology

by Steve Volk

  As Hameroff quickly learned, all the normal brain processes continue under properly administered anesthesia save one: consciousness. The patient goes right on breathing, neurons go right on firing, secreting, and absorbing chemicals. The only thing missing from “normal” brain function is the most crucial aspect of human experience: awareness. Consciousness.

  Hameroff liked the idea of specializing in anesthesiology even more when he realized he would be sitting at a sweet, personal nexus: the meeting of blood, anesthesia, and neural cells isn’t just medicine. It’s also physics.

  His grandfather.

  Einstein.

  His dreams of standing at the edge of the universe.

  In anesthesiology, the interlocking details of Hameroff’s personal narrative just clicked. But the result didn’t manifest itself with any drama for another twenty years. In the interim, Hameroff got married. Had a kid. Got divorced. Life happened, but he never lost interest in the topic. In fact, he continued working on it, publishing a collection of medical papers and penning a 1987 book, Ultimate Computing: Biomolecular Consciousness and Nanotechnology, that went relatively unnoticed outside a small coterie of professionals interested in the topic of artificial intelligence—the problem of whether or not a computer can ever be created that is capable of mimicking all the operations of the human brain.

  The book is essentially a dense, knotty, intellectual ode to the microtubule. These unbelievably tiny, 25-nanometer-wide tubes were only discovered (and accepted) in the 1960s. And Hameroff seems delighted, recounting the accidental way they blinked into view. “The solution used to affix cells to a microscope slide was changed,” he says, “so at first people thought microtubules were an anomaly produced by the new solution.”

  In reality, the old solution had been dissolving microtubules before scientists could have the pleasure of seeing them. Eventually, scientists did accept the reality of the microtubule, which proved ubiquitous, appearing in literally every biological cell—plant or animal—on the planet. Scientists also discovered, more slowly, over decades, that the microtubule is perhaps the single most versatile biological component in nature. The way our own bones keep our flesh from piling up in a heap on the floor, microtubules are the cytoskeleton that supports the structure of every cell. But they also act as conveyor belts inside cells, moving needed chemical components from one cell to another. And they are capable of moving themselves, comprising the levers, so to speak, that divide chromosomes.

  Hameroff has come to believe that microtubules are essential for understanding human consciousness. And by way of argument, he points to a single-celled organism, the humble paramecium, which lacks the neurons and synapses we boast in our brains. “The paramecium swims around, finds food, finds a mate, and avoids danger,” says Hameroff. “But it doesn’t always swim toward food or away from danger. It seems to make choices and it definitely seems to process information.”

  How, precisely, can a brainless cell be said to know when it is time to divide, eat, or mate? Hameroff says the information processing takes place in the microtubule, which gives the cell its shape and comprises the source of its primitive form of thinking. He published papers on these ideas but found resistance everywhere. Microtubules were initially easier to understand as simple girders, so there was an intellectual and scientific utility in denying them any further purpose. But he found the greatest resistance to his research among proponents of artificial intelligence (AI).

  Supporters of hard AI say that once we have computer bits and switches processing information with the same computational power as the human brain, we’ll succeed in recreating human intelligence—and consciousness. But they set their timelines for when this might be achieved and write their funding and research proposals based purely on the computational power of neurons alone. “I was telling them to push the goal posts way back,” says Hameroff, “to account for all these microtubules processing information inside the neuron. They didn’t like that.”

  Of course not.

  No one wants to be told the holy grail of his career is at best decades further down the road. So Hameroff began collecting intellectual enemies early in his career. Ultimate Computing was his cannon shot at their broadsides. Hameroff admits that, for a time, he puffed himself up with the idea that the sheer, extra computing power suggested by microtubules explained consciousness. Then a friend approached him, and with the wisdom of Socrates, merely asked a probing question: “Say you’re right,” the friend said, “and all this processing is going on inside the microtubules. So what? How does that explain consciousness?”

  To his chagrin, Hameroff realized his friend was right. He had, like the hard AI proponents themselves, merely put forth a kind of faith-based argument: if we assemble enough computing power, in the right formation, we’ll get Data from Star Trek—a conscious machine with a sense of self and a personal narrative, with goals and wishes and the ability to appreciate, viscerally, the beauty of a well-composed sonata. The problem is that there is no understood mechanism by which our own sense of self is generated. How do the firings of different networks of neurons, how would computation produce any sensation or thought at all? Hameroff now realized he had provided no answer. Merely driving the discussion further down, inside the neuron to the microtubule, suggested how much raw computing power human beings hold—but it didn’t solve the mind-body problem, the riddle of consciousness. Not even close. Thrust back into this state of wonder, into a state of open-mindedness, Hameroff found himself alone one night, several years after he published Ultimate Computing. He was in his early forties and living in a house in the Tucson desert, reading a book by Roger Penrose.

  A British mathematical physicist, Penrose reached a new level of intellectual and popular celebrity with the book, The Emperor’s New Mind, a bestselling yet densely scientific tome that leads readers through physics, cosmology, mathematics, and philosophy, all to arrive at the mystery of consciousness. Interspersing pages of equations with lucid descriptions of complicated scientific concepts, Penrose overturns several apple carts at once. And Hameroff gobbled up the details.

  Penrose’s book argues that the difference between us and a computer is one of understanding. Computers will at times grind on forever without finding a solution. But a human mind can step back from these calculations and understand when they are headed nowhere. Most famously, Penrose builds a logical argument off the work of mathematician Kurt Gödel, which demonstrates that some mathematical statements can neither be proven nor disproven—cannot be computed—yet we as human beings can still know them to be true or untrue. This ability to grasp information that cannot be expressed computationally suggests to Penrose that there must be something other than computation at work in the human mind.

  Hameroff was already transfixed. It was late at night. But he didn’t want to go to bed. He felt himself alone in a pool of lamplight, exposed to some of the most important ideas he had ever read. The reductionistic view of the workings of mind and brain, so dominant throughout science, was being systematically demolished in the 500-page book in his hands. But it was toward the end of Emperor, when Hameroff perceived his own personal connection to the material, that he realized Penrose might need him. Because at the end of his book, after swimming through hundreds of pages of dense science and mathematics, Penrose the author surfaces in what seems a new world—a world, Penrose surmises, in need of a new physics.

  In his closing pages, Penrose speculates that the key to understanding consciousness lies in quantum mechanics. In his view, the Newtonian worldview of deterministic physics isn’t sufficient to explain consciousness as the pinging of neurons, equivalent to the bits and switches of a computer carrying out computations. So perhaps, he suggests, some clue to the answer lies in the more complicated, indeterminate nature of quantum mechanics. In fact, Penrose argues that human thinking speaks to the existence of something beyond both classical and quantum physics, something that includes and perhaps transcends the two.

 
I describe the quantum in greater detail later, but for now, understand this: Penrose knew he lacked evidence for the quantum-based part of his thesis. In fact, the bulk of then-current evidence—or at least, then-current scientific thinking—suggested he was wrong. Given this conflict, what area of the brain might be able to house the tenuous, fragile operations of the quantum?

  At the end of his book, Penrose flatly admits he isn’t sure. But he extends a bony finger down into the subatomic realm just the same, saying, Here is where the answer must lie. And Hameroff, sitting alone in his house, looked at where Penrose was pointing and realized he had in fact already been there—through his research into the microtubule. Sitting there that night, he realized that he—an anesthesiologist sitting up too late, reading in his desert home—might be the one who could help Penrose take the next step.

  HAMEROFF’S LIFE MOVED AWFULLY quickly from there.

  He contacted Penrose and was invited to meet with the eminent scientist on Oxford’s campus. Hameroff had friends in England and got on a plane. When he finally arrived he was, like most people, immediately taken with Penrose—his impish smile and piercingly intelligent eyes. “Roger’s just … on another level,” says Hameroff.

  Penrose’s office was crowded with books and papers stacked up in great heaps all over the desk and floor. He turned to Hameroff casually, with the practiced air of a professor used to addressing students. Hameroff wondered if he might have flown all this way to get a quick hook.

  Hameroff talked. Penrose mostly listened, asking for a point of clarification whenever he thought it necessary. Otherwise, he remained silent—his face inscrutable. Hameroff laid out the basic understood facts of microtubules and the less well-known role these tiny structures seemed to play in human consciousness. Activity in the microtubules is constant, Hameroff told him, except when a patient is under anesthesia. Anesthetic gases work by means of weak, London forces, intermolecular forces caused by quantum dynamics. This loss of awareness under anesthesia could be the key, he said, to understanding a quantum theory of consciousness.

  Hameroff felt he had made his best case. But Penrose just smiled, thanked him for his time, and shook his hand.

  Hameroff walked out on to the Oxford campus, thinking that was the end of his relationship with Roger Penrose. “I didn’t think he was impressed with the idea at all,” he says. “I mean, I took my shot and that was it.”

  A couple of days later, Hameroff was still in London, when a friend met him in a pub. “Have you heard,” he asked, “about the talk Roger Penrose just gave?”

  The scientist had apparently just delivered a lecture on The Emperor’s New Mind. And in closing, he made an announcement that caused quite a stir in the crowd. He had just met with an American scientist named Stuart Hameroff, who had explained to him that microtubules could be the structure he was looking for to develop his quantum theory of consciousness. Penrose had liked his idea after all. And over the ensuing months the pair met, often, to refine their thinking. What they came up with would, at least in terms of the pop culture zeitgeist, capture the moment.

  I promised, or perhaps threatened might be a better word, to address quantum mechanics a bit more fully in this chapter. And so I shall. Interested readers who would like to understand it more technically and in all its confusing glory should consult the Notes and Sources at the back of this book. But what readers most need to understand is this: disputes about quantum mechanics seem to revolve less around the science of QM than what that science means.

  In other words, the scientific method has sussed out a lot of facts about the subatomic realm. But what those facts say, or don’t say, about the nature of the universe and, well, reality, remains a matter of debate. And so we are in a curious position, at this time in our history, as a species: the science we believe describes the underpinnings of our world is embraced by some—New Agers, mostly—as the foundation of both matter and spirituality. Their philosophy is that the strange properties of the quantum suggest some mystical component to the nature of man. Others, mostly materialists and atheists, accept that QM describes the subatomic but deny it has any importance beyond that. Their philosophy is such that we can still understand our world and ourselves in the light shed by Newtonian physics—all is matter, smacking this way and that.

  The result is that, by invoking the quantum realm, Hameroff and Penrose stepped right into an ongoing culture war—in which two opposing sides are claiming they know exactly what to make of the quantum, though the truth is, we can’t yet claim that kind of knowledge.

  In the quantum universe, particles regularly perform seemingly impossible feats: appearing in two places at once; communicating information across distances; blinking out of existence in one spot and reappearing suddenly in another.

  Here are just a few of the stranger quantum findings, each of which has been confirmed by numerous scientific experiments: separate particles of matter can maintain nonlocal connections, called “entanglement.” In instances in which particles have become entangled, a change to the state of one particle results in an immediate, corresponding change in the other. These connections persist across any distance, from meters to miles.

  In the phenomenon of quantum tunneling, described briefly in chapter 2, a particle can pass right through a seemingly impervious barrier.

  Then there is superposition, in which subatomic matter is said to exist in all its possible states at once—until it is interfered with in some way. At that point, the wave of possibilities is said to “collapse” and assume a measurable state. Even then, a precise, complete measurement remains impossible. We can know a quantum particle’s position, for instance, but not its velocity. If we choose instead to measure its speed, we cannot know its place. These findings have been with us, in something approaching their modern form, ever since Max Planck and Albert Einstein first began working on the conundrum of how light can display the properties of both a particle and a wave.

  Think of a particle as a billiard ball, located in a specific place and completely distinct from the other billiard balls on the table. Propelled by some outside force, the billiard balls might interact, hurtling into one another with a satisfying thwack and moving on in completely predictable ways. But any one billiard ball is decidedly not another billiard ball, and cannot be. Now conversely think of a wave as … a wave. Rather than being local to one space, a wave is spread out. Waves can in fact interfere with one another, joining and unjoining as in a roiling surf. This is the Newtonian world that we live in and observe every day. But QM has revealed an entirely different reality, in which light has proven to be both particle and wave.

  In what’s known as the classic, double-slit experiment, photons, electrons, or any atom-sized objects are shot at a screen, impervious but for two tiny slits. A photographic plate sits on the other side of the screen, there to record where each photon lands. Close one slit and the plate will record a logical pattern of photons, with the bulk of them cropping up right across from the open slit. Open both slits and the plate will record bands of photons landing in a pattern of varying intensity, consistent with a wave. So far, so good. Newton rules. But this is where things get well and truly weird: Because if just one photon is emitted into the apparatus at a time, while both slits remain open, scientists would expect to see two regular patterns of photons striking the photographic plate—one behind each slit. But, that isn’t what happens. Instead, after shooting lots of photons, one at a time, toward the slits, we find the same interference pattern we saw when the photons were emitted in a flood. The scientific conclusion is that each photon individually travels through both slits at the same time—meaning, every individual particle behaves as a wave.

  In any case where photons are being emitted individually, then literally speaking, wave interference cannot take place. But wave interference is precisely what is observed. The same experimental results hold true not just for photons, but neutrons, electrons, and protons as well. No one particularly liked this conclusion.
But it was staring them in the face: photons act as a wave when they aren’t being measured, and as particles when they are.

  It is true that the act of measuring a quantum particle involves striking it with another particle of comparable energy and size. So it isn’t just the act of looking at the wave function that causes it to collapse into a particle. Failure to make this distinction is responsible for much of the controversy surrounding QM. Still, even when properly understood, QM remains a challenge to our philosophy. The role of the experimenter in consciously choosing when and how to measure a particle does directly influence its behavior and in this sense creates a dramatic link between the person doing the observing and the quantum particle being observed. Unless you’ve read up on the quantum for yourself previously, and perhaps even if you have, you’re feeling a bit lost right about now. In a sense, so is modern physics—lost, that is, and found. Because the strange reality of the quantum realm is precisely what underpins our own more predictable, billiard ball lives.

  Physicist John Wheeler added an extra measure of crazy to our understanding of the quantum by formulating a “delayed-choice” design. In this experimental variation on the double-slit exercise described, either slit can be closed after the photon has passed the initial screen but before the photon reaches its final destination, where its location is recorded. The Wheeler experiments confirm a single photon will behave like a wave if both slits are allowed to remain open—a particle if one is closed. The result suggests the particle “knows,” after it passes through the slits, that one of the slits will ultimately be shut. Later.

  Don’t even worry about the voice in your head shouting it can’t be true. (That’s just your amygdala talking its oft-untrustworthy paranoia.) Just accept, for now, that it is true, and that these experiments raise a host of issues, both philosophical and scientific, including the nature of the relationship between the observer and the observed. I’ve long accepted, as a reporter, that my presence on the scene with a notebook and a pen causes the behavior of my sources to change, often dramatically. In fact, I sometimes have to hang around my subjects for hours or even days before they begin to let down their guard and behave as they normally do. I would never expect the fundamental building blocks of reality, however, to behave in the same seemingly conscious manner as the politicians, cops, and criminals I interview. Yet the results of these experiments suggest that is precisely what happens. This aspect of quantum mechanics has spawned a host of analyses, including the Copenhagen interpretation, which claims that quantum waves of energy “choose” a particular state only under observation. The other, leading contender is the manyworlds interpretation, which gets around this idea that we somehow create reality by measuring it by arguing that all the possibilities of a wave are realized—in separate universes. As you might imagine, mystics are among those who love the Copenhagen argument, and no matter how irrational it sounds, many rationalists dig manyworlds.