Stuart Hameroff
3.9K posts
@StuartHameroff
I am a retired Anesthesiologist and Professor, and active consciousness researcher at The University of Arizona.
Dr. Hameroff—perhaps the fairest way for me to put it is this: Orch-OR seems to localize the hard problem more sharply than most theories do. What I’m still trying to get is whether the OR→qualia bridge is a primitive fact of reality, or something future theory may explain more deeply.
In #depression, electric fields diverging from the activity of neurons that generate them may signal a loss of coordinated control—much like an orchestra in which musicians gradually drift out of alignment with the conductor academic.oup.com/cercor/article…
Dr. Hameroff—while I still don’t see the bridge from OR to proto-consciousness, I’ll concede this: current microtubule/anesthesia findings make Orch-OR way less easy to dismiss than ever before. So perhaps the empirical side is moving your way, even if the deepest explanatory step still remains open.
Fractal time crystals; 12 orders of frequency; 5 orders of size; What if that scaling isn't just biological architecture, it's the geometric signature of coherence protection itself? If each order is an octave and the structure follows Pythagorean the brain isn't just oscillating... It's tuned! What's doing the tuning?
By scanning brains while people actively took intelligence tests, neuroscientists discovered that high test scores are linked to highly flexible, diverse neural networks. The findings offer the first physical evidence for a new theory of human… dlvr.it/TRZ5z9
@StuartHameroff You will have to explain this. Mayer-overton predicts a constant increase in potency but above a certain chain length the potency vanishes.
The human body is an information system — and AI is helping us decode it to cure or prevent disease. In @bigthink, our scientists and researchers explain how #AI is helping us simulate human cells, visualize hidden pieces of biology, and detect disease before symptoms appear. bit.ly/46fBq6f
@StuartHameroff For the Orch OR Orchestra who is the conductor?
@StuartHameroff Damning contradictory evidence mounts inexorably, shredding the claim’s foundation. Every single piece of empirical data ever marshaled to prop up Strong Orch OR integrates seamlessly and explains with devastating clarity through the weak form alone. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12…
New discovery! Different anesthetics all seem to push the brain into unconsciousness in the same way: Activity is destabilized and dominated by slow waves. This could block signals. cell.com/cell-reports/f… #neuroscience @MIT_Picower @mitbrainandcog @mcgovernmit @ScienceMIT
Action potentials are fundamental but there is more going on in brain function. doi.org/10.3389/fnsys.… #neuroscience
@StuartHameroff I know that’s the main point, but if you correct that one simple error, recognizing that the apparatus for consciousness (pattern recognition coupled with/ interpretation) was organized by natural selection (no feelings required), then you get computational functionalism for free
@StuartHameroff Here is one of @vanswinderenlab's papers looking at anesthesia, sleep, and attention – in flies. "The remote roots of consciousness in fruit-fly selective attention?" A review/position paper (from some years ago now). pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15714556/
@JosephJacks_ @StuartHameroff @anirbanbandyo Plants have no nerves, but have almost identical electrical impulse for communicating damage to the rest of the plant. It's just much slower. You can also anesthetize them with ether, just like an animal.
Dr. Hameroff—thank you for explaining why Penrose thought OR was needed. What I’m still missing is why OR itself should have an experiential side at all: why a collapse should be proto-conscious rather than only physical. That’s the part I find really puzzling.
Dr. Hameroff—I can follow the OR part as a physical proposal, but what is the reason for treating an OR event as experiential? Why is the collapse proto-conscious rather than just physical? I understand the collapse. What I don’t yet get is the bridge from collapse to proto-consciousness.
@StuartHameroff mr hameroff do you have any graphics that show what a helical organic oscillator looks like?? i’m very curious in terms of morphology!
Given all the uncertainty in this area, this dismissive way of talking about other theories seems very out of place. Especially the description in another post of these other theories as "pathetic." I know a few people who advocate a deliberately "adversarial" mode of science, but I am against it. I agree that general anesthesia is an important source of data, sometimes neglected (but emphasized by Nick Lane, Bruno van Swinderen, and others).
You’re right and I apologize. The context is decades of suppression of Orch OR despite its preponderance of scientific evidence. Anil pushes ‘biological naturalism’ without saying what it is (‘maybe mitochondria?’). Loyal to functional neurocomputationalism, Ned pushes back sarcastically ‘Can only meat machines be conscious?’ sciencedirect.com/science/articl… He says all theories of consciousness are ‘meat neutral’, implying ‘so how could it matter?’ (All except Orch OR.) Here’s Ned’s picture of a biologically natural neuron which I called pathetic.
