Things have changed, patterns are shifting, long standing truths and age-old wisdom seems now often to wrinkle like spoiled milk.

Many of us will confront this transition with open minds and willing hearts.

Others make it torn to pieces.

But now is the time to seek to yank off the blinders and gaze deep into the maelstrom that is human evolution.

Join me on Galactic Now on Patreon to share the passion and thrill of new discoveries to joyfully band together in a world that's now obliterating old dogmas and easy answers.

Because mystery remains alive and well, and it's coming for all of us.

Atreon.com/neon Galactic.

To explore how the fabric of this universe may explain not only material reality, but also the experience of that reality by consciousness.

This is Neon Galactic.

I'm James Faulk with Co host, educator and fellow traveller David Stess.

Thanks for joining us.

In many ways, it's a given that human consciousness was the first frontier of organized human investigation, a pursuit that birthed a long line of ancient esoteric wisdom communities dedicated to the study of mind, the self, and their relationships to the broader cosmos.

But things change.

As time went on, and the sciences shield away from subjectivity to put more and more focus on the material world as arbiter of truth, such research lost its luster and became supposedly anathema to the scientific method.

So here we are now, all these centuries later, and still the questions of consciousness vex us, resisting explanation and making up what's become known in the field as the Hard problem.

Is there any more fundamental human question than how the odds and ends of material existence, the human body, and wider physical world might combine to eventually produce the exquisite complexities of sensory experience?

Solving this mystery would go a long way toward answering so many of the fundamental questions about human existence, spiritual possibilities, anomalous phenomenon, and the potential meaning, if any, to life.

Might it be possible that consciousness is an intrinsic part of the universe, not just an epiphenomenon, and that evolution itself might have been drawn forward by a cosmos in search of positive experience?

These are big questions, so where do we look for answers?

Since the discovery and mapping of the quantum world, we've seen many of our seemingly long settled assumptions about reality toppled in favour of a much more holistic, connected and mysterious set of fundamental truths.

The quantum underlies every aspect of the physical world, and its nature remains a subject of much debate.

Could the two questions of human consciousness and the quantum connect?

Could the seemingly wet and warm environments of the human brain host quantum processes, and might those processes help explain the wickedly complex workings of the human mind?

Or is that very question just a sleight of hand to solve 1 mystery by drowning it in another?

Our guest today is an innovative thinker, a maverick in the field of consciousness, and someone who has confronted the mainstream scientific establishment with a theory that seems to be gaining more and more credence as time goes on and evidence mounts.

Retired University of Arizona professor and anaesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, along with physicist Rodger Penrose, developed the orchestrated objective reduction theory of consciousness.

He joins us today to discuss the idea, the proof, the battles he's fought to advance, the theory, and above all, the ongoing mystery of consciousness and what that might reveal about the cosmos.

The human brain, neurons, and consciousness itself may be infinitely more capable and astounding than we've ever expected.

And if so, Hammer Off may have the why of it.

Welcome, Sir.

Thank you, James, nice to be here.

Thanks for having me.

Yeah, no problem.

This is an absolute privilege and we're joined by David Stuss, my good friend and occasional Co host.

Anything you wanted to add before we get into the questions, David?

Oh, just delighted to be here.

I've been tracking Stewart's work for many, many years, starting back in the 90s.

And yeah, this is a real privilege for me, too.

Thank you.

So Stewart, if you don't mind, we'll start off with microtubules.

It's something I didn't mention in the introduction, but that's a key part of your theory of consciousness.

Can you explain for folks who may not be swimming in this kind of material all the time, what a microtubule is, how it came to be a speciality of yours, and then how it fits into the question of consciousness?

Right.

Well, our living cells have a an internal skeleton, kind of like our bodies have bones.

And the cytoskeleton in in cells is comprised of structures including microtubules, which are cylindrical protein polymers that self assemble from a protein called tubulin, a peanut shaped protein that has a positive negative end.

And these things actually self assemble into fairly long, in some, some cases cylinders which have crystal like lattice structures and they make the the the the main part of the skeleton of the cell, but they're also the nervous system of the cell.

So imagine if your bones also were your nervous system combined.

And that's kind of what happens inside cells.

There are other parts of the cytoskeleton.

There's actin protein centrioles, which are kind of the, the mothership of the cytoskeleton next to the nucleus and the kind of where all the microtubules radiate from and, and microtubule associated proteins that can connect one microtubule to another that can walk along the microtubule carrying synaptic cargo for synaptic plasticity and others like Tau, which is prominent when you get Alzheimer's disease, when your microtubules fall apart, that may stabilize the microtubules, but they also may be traffic signals to tell the motor proteins where to get off and deliver their cargo.

So their placement is kind of like memory.

And I think microtubules actually encode memory because most people in neuroscience would say, well, memory is in the synapses and it may be to some extent in the synaptic protein.

So the more the the, the more a synapse passes information, it's going to, it's going to solidify that pathway through a network.

And most people think of network effects as necessary.

But the synaptic proteins only last hours to days and memories can last lifetime.

So it's much more likely that the the memories in dendritic microtubules, which which have a huge capacity, but we can come back to that later.

The microtube was organized stuff inside the cell.

So if a neuron grows like it's a microtube is polymerizing and pushing the actin ahead of it and to make a new synapse or to branch or to make a connection here or there wherever it goes.

And when cells divide, now neurons don't divide, which is actually a very strategic point which I'll come come back to.

But when cell, most cells divide the microtubules, whatever they're doing well, deep polymerize and reassemble in mitotic spindles, which are necessary for mitosis to pull the chromosomes apart.

Now exact duplicate of each other.

So you have the same chromosomes in the two daughter cells and and after they form their own cells and those microtubules go back to being whatever they were doing in a kidney cell or a liver cell or whatever.

Neurons don't divide.

So and dendrites, they're kept so they, they had the same lattice arrangement over your lifetime basically.

So and there's about a billion, maybe 100 million to a billion tubulins per neuron.

And each one can be in about 30 states, a genetic or post translational.

So the the information storage capacity in the microtubules is what 30 do the to the billionth or a billion to the 30th, I forget which.

But either way, it's a huge number per neuron.

So another way to look at that is that if you think the microtubules are oscillating in at megahertz, let's say, which we know that they are, or 10 megahertz then and there's a billion of them, that's 10 to the 16th operations per second per neuron.

Now the singularity, remember Ray Kurzweil and, and talking about when we reach brain equivalents, we'll have a singularity.

Well, the, the brain equivalence I calculated was based on about a billion, sorry, 100 billion neurons with 1000 synapses at 100 Hertz, which gives you their calculations 10 to the 16th operations per second for the whole brain.

And so in the 80s I was going around to neural net and AI meeting saying no, no, no, the information capacity is actually 10 to the 16th operations per neuron.

So your, your target, your goal post is way, way, way downstream.

Well, they didn't like that very much and they basically told me to get lost and to F off and a few other things because, you know, they're trying to, you know, get a few more billion out of the government to make conscious computers, which of course didn't happen and it hasn't happened.

Probably won't happen at least in silicon.

But so I was, you know, I, I had gotten interested in the microtubules in medical school and, and then went into anesthesia and started studying how anesthesia works.

Turns out they, they act on microtubules, but that's another story that we can come back to.

But I did some modelling of microtubule information processing with physicists in the late 70s and 80s.

And like I said, I was going around these meetings being a pain in the butt to the AI guys.

And then one day somebody said, OK, Mr.

Wise, I asked, let's say you're right and that explains consciousness or sorry, that gives you all this information processing.

How does that explain consciousness?

How does that explain, you know, pink and love and envy and qualia and all that?

Basically the hard problem, which hadn't come out yet, at least Dave Chalmers version.

And I took the point very seriously.

I said I don't know, that's a very good question.

So fortunately that person recommended I read a book by Roger Penrose called The Emperor's New Mine, which had a mechanism for consciousness.

And, and so I did and I, I read it and I was blown away by it.

And I, he in the first party, he talked about consciousness having to be something non computable through because of Girdle's theorem, that a mathematical theorem can't prove itself, that you need something outside the system like a mathematician.

And in the case of the brain, everything was a, if everything's a classical computer, you need something outside of classical, classical physics to be involved in judging or understanding or, or gauging whether something is true or not.

Understanding is a good broader term for that.

And for that, he said you had to go outside physics, outside classical physics to quantum physics and collapse of the wave function because we don't understand and what guides, what guides the collapse of the wave function.

And some people question whether there is a collapse of the wave function.

So that got into the measurement problem in quantum mechanics, which I hadn't thought about too much back then, but when I read the book, I thought, you know, I don't really understand all this, but he's on to something and he's obviously very smart and he's got a mechanism.

And it's the only mechanism I'd ever seen.

And still to this day, 30 years after I read the book, I haven't heard another specific mechanism for consciousness other than emergence hand wave, hand wave, emergence complexity, hand wave, blah blah, blah, or integrated information of pure numbers that don't have any biology.

So as far as I can tell, it's, it's the only it, it was and remains the only specific scientific mechanism.

And of course, but but he didn't have a, a biological device in the brain that could do such a thing.

And he knew that things in quantum technology needed to be done at absolute 0 temperature to avoid decoherence.

So he knew there was going to be some issues, but he said there must be something that can do this in the brain.

But he he said, I have no idea what it is.

If anybody out there has an idea, let me know.

So I was reading this book and I go, yeah, I got an idea.

It's microtubules.

I've been studying microtubules 20 years at that point.

And I wrote him a old fashioned letter and he wrote back and said, yeah, let's talk because I was going to, I was going to England for something else.

And she invited me to Oxford.

And, and so I went and met me at the train station, went to his office and he says, so tell me about these microtubules.

They're not simulations, are they?

They're real.

I said, oh, yeah, they're definitely biological, biologically real.

And I handed him a book that that I had written about microtubules in 8687.

And this was about 92.

I think that when when we met and a bunch of papers and we went through all the pictures.

And he was particularly taken by the Fibonacci geometry of the microtubule, A lattice.

And so we went over that and he mentioned he was going to a conference at Cambridge with philosophers Dan Dennett and Pat Churchland, both reductionist, materialist eliminativists, and they already didn't like his ideas and, and had let it be known.

And anyway, I said, oh, I'd like to go to that, but I got to go to my meeting, what I was there for.

And so he, he said, well, thank you.

And we shook hands and said goodbye and I walked away.

I said, well, that was cool.

I got to meet Rodger Penrose thinking, well, that was the end of that.

But when I got back to London a couple weeks later on my way home, my friend had been to the conference in Cambridge.

He said, well, Rodger Penrose was talking about you and your microtubule idea.

And I said, wow, that was pretty cool.

And soon after, I got invited to a meeting in Sweden that he was involved with.

And we we met up above the polar circle and midnight sun.

It was just a gathering of scientists, no audience or anything, and started collaborating and figuring out how we could apply his idea, which was called objective reduction, a collapse of the wave function due to quantum gravity to microtubules.

And I said, yeah, we got to do that.

I had no idea how.

And we started both started talking about it and it, it took a while and, and eventually in 96, our full full theory came out.

We had another paper before that because Pat Churchland wrote an attack piece against us, a very smarmy, obnoxious, sarcastic, which is her style if you know her.

And, and we had to respond to that, But, and then the full theory came out in 96 and it was immediately criticized.

The brains too warm, wet and noisy.

Everybody knows that you guys are full of crap and forget about it.

There's no collapse anyway.

And what are you even talking about and blah, blah, blah.

So, you know, it didn't, it went over like a, a lead balloon initially, although people were so wow, that's different.

And that's interesting.

And, you know, we had to face the, the warm, wet and noisy problem, which we finally did figure out and, and now there's pretty good evidence, there's very good evidence for it.

And it turns out anesthesia acts by quantum effects on microtubules.

There's good evidence for that.

So All in all, and some other stuff I could talk about, All in all, I think there's more evidence.

We haven't proven collapse yet.

Collapse is a tough nut to crack, but the conditions for for collapse that we need, which is quantum coherent superposition and warm temperature for a a period of time T to be determined.

And I'll come back to that point.

I think it's all been proven pretty well.

So I claim that, and I I say this in interactions with other scientists, philosophers, people like debate with discuss with on on X Twitter and at conferences and wherever.

I claim that our theory, which is called orchestrated objective reduction or Co R has more supportive evidence, has more explanatory power, biological connection and experimental evidence then all the other theories, which I call cartoon neuron theories combined.

And because those theories like global workspace, higher order thought to some extent IIT, although IIT doesn't even have neurons, it's just pure numbers, which is I think silly, but you know, they call it a fundamental theory.

I, I that I don't quite, I don't buy that.

And then predictive coding and recurrent processing, which I like because predictive coding and recurrent processing can happen in multiple scales.

And I think the key is the problem with cartoon neurons are a one scale, a Hertz EEG membrane membrane activity, you know, up to 100 Hertz, maybe 40 Hertz, maybe 100, a 150.

But actually it turns out microtubules have oscillations in kHz, megahertz, gigahertz and terahertz every three orders of magnitude like a fractal.

In fact, we're calling them time crystals.

So microtubules seem to be particularly built for this, or I don't know if it's a question whether they evolve to do that or it's just a part of nature.

But any case, they can handle all these frequencies, both sensing and actuating, which is perfect for biology because, you know, we have very tiny stuff going on in our bodies.

We have further large stuff and like a whole grain, you want the same information every level.

And I think that's what happened.

What's happening?

So that's kind of an aerial view of, of how I got, we got here and where we are now.

And like you said, there is more and more evidence.

So we figured out how to do experiments looking for quantum effects.

And we've shown warm temperature quantum effects in a microtubule that's inhibited by anesthesia, which is got about a million times more evidence than any other theory.

Because they're all, you know, the other theories they like in the big showdown between global neuronal workspace and IIT as part of the Templeton program, which I'll be happy to talk about 'cause we were in that too.

The whole prediction was in a, in a $5,000,000 experiment 'cause they had, you know, hundreds of patients and Mris and EE GS and blah blah blah, ME GS 5,000,000 bucks and 11 theory.

Particularly they see MRI activity posterior and the other theory anterior which and in the end it was inconclusive.

Well, sometimes they hit see it here somebody's so it's all a big waste of time.

And even if one had come out, if you have MRI activity in one particular place versus another, what does it tell you about consciousness?

Nothing because MRI is apparently metabolic related in blood flow.

And and so ironically, what's metabolically active and consumes energy into the brain are membrane depolarizations and cognition and consciousness is actually a very low energy process because it's a quantum process in the microtubules.

And one example of that was given by Robin Carhartt Harris, who's a famous psychedelic researcher.

He's now at UCSF.

But back in 2012, he was, he was in still in London and he gave a talk at our conference on psychedelics and he had this experiment.

This is a really great experiment.

He had patients sitting in an MRI scanner or an EEG or an Meg actually, and with an IV and they were, they got intravenous psilocybin, psilicin, the active ingredient that you give IV and they were told to lie there peacefully with their eyes closed.

Don't look around, keep your eyes closed, don't talk.

Tell us later how you were feeling, what you were experiencing.

While you're getting the psilocybin, we're going to scan your brain and check your M e.g, e.g.

And they kind of expected to see the, you know, MRI and MRI in particular light up like a pinball machine because of all those tripping activity and the Meg also to be quite active.

And so they they did the experiment and the patients reported, subjects reported later that they were vividly hallucinating and having this amazing psychedelic experience.

But yeah, their MRI was cold and dark, like they were comatose, and their EEG energy was almost flat, like they were, you know, brain dead or comatose or something.

And yet they were vividly hallucinating.

So I remember I chaired the session for Robin and he had this explanation by entropy, which he's still, he's still saying, which I don't, I actually don't agree with, but it could be right.

But what I said was that what really burns the energy and the membranes?

Cognition, if you're not, if you're just laying there, your membranes are on vacation, they're not doing anything, but you're conscious as hell.

You're highly conscious because the the microtubule quantum stuff is going crazy at a deeper level, which you found out later is, is probably megahertz and gigahertz, more quantum activities and that's where consciousness was.

But you had no cognition, you don't, you didn't have to interact with the outside world, so your membranes could rest and you didn't need ATP or anything.

So the MRI was was cold and dark.

So I don't think the point is that the experiments like the the Templeton stuff, GMW versus IIT and the rest are pointless because just knowing where an MRI lights up doesn't really tell you a that consciousness is actually happening there.

And even if it is what is causing the consciousness, this is the blood flow.

I mean, that'd be kind of a hard sell.

Probably the best explanation for why they're and, and, and the, the BOLD signal from MRI blood oxygen level dependence comes after the activity.

So it's not, you know, signaling the activity.

It's, it's, it's, it's happening after the activity.

And nobody's, nobody's quite sure why, why, you know, you need more nutrients or blood supply, but that didn't really add up.

And one explanation I heard was that actually it's to cool the brain.

It's to cool down that little region of the brain after something's happened.

And that would be especially important in a quantum mechanism.

But so the point is that the other, the other theories have zero evidence.

And we have, you know, a fair amount and and yet we're still the the oddball.

We're still the underdog, which is fine.

I don't mind that.

But you know, I think we're on the right track.

And the anaesthesia story has come around towards microtubules.

That's kind of a whole nother story.

Let me ask a couple of questions just to get a sense of how how the brain works.

You mentioned that there's cognition, but then there's also consciousness, and they're two separate things.

It sounds like you're thinking that the microtubules are responsible, responsible for generating the conscious experience of the of the mind, of the brain.

But then cognition is a neuronal thing.

Is that fair to say?

Would you?

Well, I think that micro tubes may be involved in cognition too, but but they they need to be a classical, sorry, they need to be quantum.

They could do it classical, they can do classical information.

And I think it could be that cognition, at least not well, non conscious cognition could be strictly membranes.

You know, you drive, you're driving to work or you go the same way every, every time you're daydreaming, or at least I am, about what you're going to be doing when you get there or why your team lost or whatever.

And, and, and then all of a sudden somebody swerves in front of you and become conscious.

You again, become conscious of the, of the road and you're driving.

So I think, you know, you're, we can be on autopilot where the, the membranes are active and the cognition's going on, but you're not necessarily conscious of it, but it can quickly draw you back in if if need be.

So yeah, I think there's a distinction there.

And the other way to express that is that in anaesthesia, we, we use evoke potential monitoring, for example, for spine surgery.

So if you're the surgeon's operating on the C spine from the front to the back and you want to make sure that he or she isn't, you know, literally screwing the spinal cord with a screw because they're putting screws in the bones and, or causing anything to impair spinal cord function.

We have these electrophysiology people will come in and put, put electrodes on the feet and the hands and the scalp.

And they can stimulate the feet of the hands and measure the signals from the scalp, from the, from the brain to, to know that there's signals passing through the spinal cord or, and they can stimulate the brain and, and make the foot twitch or the, the hand to know that the motor is going through.

And, and yet the patient's unconscious, the patient's under anesthesia.

So the point is that the brain's still active under anesthesia.

There's EEG, it's just slowed down.

You have the evoked potentials, which we use for, for monitoring.

And you know, neurons fire.

If you, if you are able to stimulate the neuron, it will, it will fire, but there's no consciousness.

So what's happening at the membrane, which is what we can easily measure, may or may not be related to what's going on in consciousness.

It, it could be, but it doesn't have to be.

And there's, there are cognitive things without consciousness.

There's conscious things without cognition, like in the, in the psychedelic, in the psosonic experiments I mentioned.

So yeah, they're not the same.

And then it's not just a graduation.

And when you get really cognitively excited, you become conscious.

No, you can be conscious at a very low, subtle, almost, well, it's perceptible level.

So I think they're different.

And I think that's, that's a hard lesson.

You know, it's kind of like behaviorists gave up on consciousness to measure what they can measure, which is cognition and behavior, what happens when you move stuff or you respond.

So they weren't measuring consciousness and they knew that, but they didn't care.

So they made consciousness a dirty word and dirty concept and just focused on what they can measure to bring psychology back into science in in their view.

I think that was their motivation.

Is there evidence that you can point to where the, you know the activity of microtubules is interrupted by anesthesia?

Is that something that's been able to be measured?

Yeah, Yeah.

So anesthesia is a very interesting story and I think probably the key to this whole thing because anesthesia selectives, I just said it takes away consciousness but spares neural activity, including evoked potentials and cognition, which can continue.

So where and what?

What does it actually do?

So in the in the 1800s, nineteenth century, excuse me, these gases were discovered, which if you inhaled a small amount of them, small amount, people got euphoric, giddy, and this is like ether, diethyl ether.

So they had ether frolics parties based on sniffing ether and then laughing gas, nitrous oxide.

And if you get you get all giddy and goofy.

And and that's still used particularly in the den.

We don't use it too much the ore very much, but it's used in Dennis Dennis office and stuff.

And I used it a lot when I when I was in anesthesia, at least early in my career anyway.

So if anesthesia is selected for consciousness, what does it act on, right?

Where that?

So that's the key.

It's the best way to figure it out.

Figure out, well, anesthetic gases are inert pretty much.

They don't form chemical bonds.

You know, all the drugs we give, the other drugs we give that are polar are polar.

They have charge and we give them IV or they take by pill and it gets absorbed or you give it IM or some other way.

And they're polar soluble in water, soluble in fluids because they have charges and they go to charge, they find opposite charges.

So they got a positive charge.

They find a negative charge like on a receptor, you know, on the, on the outside of a cell.

They don't have to even go inside the cell.

And that's how most drugs work.

Anesthesia, the gases, they're well, how do you know where a drug goes when you give it?

It's based on its solubility.

So everything, all the polar drugs are soluble in, in, in, in charged areas, in, in water, in blood or anywhere there's charges and it's chemistry.

So the charges interact and, and that, and they do chemistry and they bond in one way or the other.

And the anesthetic gases are inert and they don't form chemical bonds at all.

In fact, one anesthetic gas is xenon, which is an inert element, a gas.

And, and, but all of them had, and they're all chemically different.

This is, it was, this is kind of bizarre.

They're they, they're chemically different.

They can be ethers, they can be inert elements like xenon, they can be halogenated hydrocarbons and then there's some IV ones.

But all the gas they have, they they share one feature, which is A at least a surface or the whole atom in case of xenon that is inert and has a full electron outer shells, no electrons to share with with other other atoms or elements or molecules.

So what happens is if you have two completed electron outer shells and like for example, 2 benzene, 2 benzene rings.

So the aromatic rings of benzene.

I'm going to digress for a second.

But but life is based on organic chemistry, people, organic carbon chemistry.

And people have been saying like David Chalmers is trying to backtrack on the hard problem now and, and saying that AI can be conscious and AI will inevitably be conscious because there's no fundamental difference between silicon and carbon.

To then I say bullshit because first of all, it's not just carbon, it's organic carbon.

And what that means is aromatic rings.

So you know benzene, like what goes in our gas tank, It's 6 carbon, it's 6 carbons.

Let me back up in the, in the 18th century, chemists had developed, had, were working out all the hydrocarbons, which are linear chains of carbon and hydrogen.

And they could have one or two bonds and they had a formula CN plus N or CN plus 2N or, or the, the number of hydrogens.

But then they had C6H6, which didn't fit because they and, and they Keckley, this, this German chemist Keckley supposedly had a dream that the, that the linear hydrocarbons were snakes.

And one of the snakes swallowed its tail and became a loop, a ring of the ore Boris in mythical terms.

And he woke in in the morning and said, aha, benzene is a ring.

And he was right.

And it's a hexagonal ring, 6 carbons, which means there are three extra electrons.

So the, those electrons form electronic clouds above and below the, the, the ring.

These electronic clouds are essentially quantum objects because they have electrons distributed all over the, you know, all over this volume.

So it's a volume of a pure quantum object.

And yet it's, it's, it's stable and a lot of energy.

You put them all together in bulk, light a match and they explode.

That's how our cars run.

But if you put them in an array, A geometric array where they're just barely touching, like in graphene or in fuller rings where they make carbon nanotubes or buckyballs, or inside an amino, inside a protein where the aromatic amino acids can just touch at the van der Waals forces, what happens is the electrons in this one repel the electrons in this one, and the electrons oscillate back and forth.

They couple and oscillate and they oscillate in terahertz 10 to the 12 Hertz, which is infrared or optical.

So they're actually giving off photons just during their their oscillations.

And this is what happens inside proteins.

In fact, this is how proteins fold.

The aromatic amino acids attract each other.

They get rid of the water.

They don't want the water.

Oil and water don't mix.

And so they form these these regions inside proteins that are all aromatic rings, which have quantum optical effects like fluorescence and so forth.

And they get rid of the water.

So from an anesthesiologist standpoint, we give her our anesthetic gas through a through a mask and or a tube and it goes in the the the patient and where does it go?

Goes to the non polar regions where there there's no water, these aromatic rings inside proteins and that's where they act.

So we know that the anesthesia acts in regions of non polar aromatic rings inside proteins which have quantum optical effects and quantum effects.

And and that's where they act.

And that means that they're they're they must be, since they don't, they act by quantum interactions, they bind where the quantum stuff is happening.

They must be working by a hippie quantum effects.

And we've shown that experimentally that anaesthetics binding microtubules, but also in our experiment in the Templeton Foundation.

Yeah, it was a contest actually, where they try to pair two different theories.

We we had a a meeting with IIT.

We couldn't come to an agreement because I couldn't figure out how in the world you could falsify IIT because I didn't, I didn't really.

I don't really think it's a real theory, but it's a whole nother story.

So we gave up and but Templeton said, OK, we'll give you money just to do your experiment.

Which it, which we, what we want to do is, is demonstrate a quantum effect in a microtubule and ambient temperature and then and, and then show that it goes away with anesthesia.

And our, our adversaries, Christophe Kolk and Julio Tanoni said, yeah, great, we'll do it inside a live monkey and we'll put the monkey to sleep and then see if the quantum effect goes away.

I said, no, you don't understand.

This has never been done before.

Even to do it at ambient, we have to do it in an optical bench with all these lasers lined up perfectly.

You can't have any vibration to do it inside of a you can't do it inside a monkey.

And not the first time, you know, maybe someday.

But first we got to do it in an optical bench.

And so that's what we did and we did it at Princeton and Greg Scholes lab and our, our postdoc, our cholera went there and did this experiment where he hit a microtubular with AUV light and, and it fluoresces.

But it, but before fluoresces, the exoton propagates down the microtubule for a pure a length in a period of time and then emits a, a lower energy photon fluorescence.

And, and we gave, we gave these labels which fluoresce at a slightly different wavelength so that when the, when it propagated, the exoton propagated.

If it got to this, it would come out of the wavelength we knew was the was the amka, Amka was the label.

We could tell how far it went.

And so the first thing we found was that it propagated farther than you can explain by a classical mechanism.

It had to be a quantum mechanism propagated farther in distance and also persisted longer in time.

So it was a room temperature quantum effect which we showed in a microtubule, which is the first thing that we, you know, first prediction.

The second prediction was a good would go away with anaesthesia.

We tried two different anesthetics, isofluorine a gas and atomidate A a soluble polar one.

Both of them inhibited about the same same amount, so we called our shots.

We showed the quantum affected room temperature in a microtubule and it was dampened significantly by by different anesthetics.

So our experiment worked.

I think it's the only experiment in the whole Templeton program that has shown any support for any theory.

All the rest have been inconclusive and a huge waste of money and time, $30 million they poured into that.

Our experiment was $100,000 IIT.

They got 510,000,000 total.

And they're still spending that money on propaganda and promoting theories that have been already been disproven.

If we have been disproven they'd have thrown us the heck out of science.

But they they just keep pushing out the same BS because now they have big names behind them.

I think so anyway.

A little pet peeve there.

But it is annoying that all this money is just going down the drain wasted on these stupid experiments which aren't going to show anything.

Even if you show MRI, I call it pin the tail on the on the on the brain map.

You're just saying, oh, you're going to see Amri here.

You're going to see an MRI here.

If it's here, you win.

If it's here, we win.

Bullshit.

Because you don't know.

Even if you predict properly, it doesn't tell you what consciousness is.

What's it doing there?

You know, where it is, is not the problem.

I think consciousness can be all over the place or any place, any particular place actually can move around.

And even if it's not, it's distributed memory like memory over over a lot of the brain because it's entangled.

So I think the idea of it's here, it's there depending on firing here and there is is is garbage.

Do you have a question you want to ask?

Yeah, I'm, I'm curious, Stuart, as far as the the aromatic interactions, I'm wondering if you looked at DNA at all.

I mean, the of course one of the main stabilizing forces is you got that right pie stacking, you know, all the way throughout the basis.

So why proteins are not nucleic acids?

Well, I think I think DNA is also a quantum device, a quantum viewer.

I have a, a section in one of my papers about a model for, for quantum computing and DNA.

Because the pie stack, as you know, as you just said, the Helix, but if you go down the core of the Helix, it's, it's one purine or perimen after another one.

So all these nucleic acids stacked up in the pie stack and that's a whole linear quantum volume right there.

So yeah, there's probably some kind of quantum communication going on between the DNA and the and the microtubules.

But as far as moment to moment consciousness, I think it's in the microtubules with maybe, you know, like memory banks or genetic constructions coming from the DNA.

But I think biology in general is a quantum mechanism.

I think, you know, people, particularly the, you know, the neuro computationalists that I've been ragging on, they don't even think about what life is.

And I think life is as big a mystery as consciousness.

And, you know, they kind of blow that off by saying, well, you know, it's functionalism, metabolism, adaptation, homeostasis, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

I'm going, yeah, but that's not life.

Those are the function functions that support life, the conditions for life.

But what is life?

And, you know, we don't have a good definition.

I think the vitalists were probably closest, but they got run out of town because they were calling on either electromagnetics, which people already knew about, or some unknown force.

And but then Schrodinger in his book What is What is Life?

Actually raised the idea of a quantum vitalism, which I think is probably the right idea.

I think we need the brain needs quantum coherence and entitlement for things like binding, spatial, temporal binding.

Zero phase lag, gamma synchrony, how you can have 40 Hertz over here exactly synchronized with over here.

You can't do it by axonal pulses or firings.

You can't do it by ephaptic transmission 'cause they drop off with 10 to the three or 10 to the six, I forget.

So they're not going to get far enough.

And I think entanglement's the only way to explain perfectly zero phase like gamma, gamma synchrony and probably a, a Symphony of a lot higher frequencies.

My friend honorbound Banja Pagya in at the National Institute of Material Sciences in, in Japan in SCUBA discovered coherent oscillations of microtubules in Hertz, kHz, megahertz, gigahertz and terahertz every three orders of magnitude, which is why we think microtubules are, are time crystals.

And So what he did was this is actually really cool experiment.

If you if this is a microtubule, let's say, and you put 4 electrodes on it and to, to, to stimulate and to the recorder, however you you work it out, if you just put a voltage across, it's an insulator, there's no current.

But if you apply a voltage or, or an alternating current, let's say alternating voltage, however you want to describe it, and sweep the frequencies from zero on up, it's an insulator insulator.

But then you get to a particular frequency, let's say kHz.

Now there's a huge jump in conductance, ballistic conductance.

It may be quantum if you get rid of the interface.

But you and you see three peaks and each peak has three peaks.

So it's a triplet of triplets and, and OK, then they, and then you get higher frequency and they go away.

And then you get up to, so that was killed.

Then you get up to megahertz, you see the same thing, three orders higher.

Then you get up to gigahertz, you see the same thing.

Terahertz, you see the same thing and you can measure triplets from the scalp, you can measure megahertz triplets from the temporal area of the scalp.

So it's part of the EEG.

And we're actually working on experiments looking for effects of anesthesia on the megahertz triplets and that'll be reported on at the The Science of Consciousness conference in Tucson in April.

Some experiments that Anaban's team has done in Japan.

So more and more evidence that and, and megahertz cannot come from membranes.

Membranes can't depolarize that, that fast.

So, and even kHz, you know, the, the neural link that Elon Musk's thing works in kHz, I think 19 kHz.

And we actually had the one of the first the recipients of it come talk to our consciousness club at the University of Arizona.

And you know, he had this horrible accident and it was a quad from from here down.

And they put this thing in And now he can, you know, he can, he can, he can talk because and he can move his eyes and just by turning his head and, and fixating on, on something, it's like a cursor.

And then he so he can operate a computer.

And he was, he, while he was talking, he was also playing chess with, with somebody in the audience on a, on a screen who was from the chess club, so must have at least known how to play pretty well.

And he beat him while he was telling us about his experience.

It was, it was really quite impressive actually.

The point is that 19 kHz is too fast for, for nerves to fire or, or membrands depolarized.

So I asked, I said, well, why are you using that?

Well, that works the best.

What do you communicate?

Well, we don't really know, but that's what works the best.

So they're probably work.

They're probably communicating directly to micro tubules without knowing it.

And so that's kHz and then you get up to a megahertz and that's probably where the, the, the real action is as far as consciousness about 10 megahertz.

You can also have gigahertz and, and terahertz and you know, people are putting photons into the brain and it actually gets through somehow through the skull.

And it seems to be beneficial if you pulse it at at 40 Hertz.

And we've been using ultrasound because megahertz.

I want to stimulate microtubules, but I don't want to put electricity in the brain.

But ultrasound is megahertz in mechanical vibrations.

And we've been using ultrasound and anesthesia forever.

And, you know, I was very familiar with it.

So when I went on about and discovered all this, I said, well, Gee, I wonder if we could megahertz.

And I saw this ultrasound mechanical.

Holy cow, why don't we try ultrasound?

So I went to the literature to see if anybody would try ultrasound of the brain and it was approved for imaging the brain.

It was still used to image in newborn brains through the Fontanelle where there's no skull to look for bleeds and, and well, how, how damaged can it be if they're giving it to newborns and they, it's approved for imaging.

Of course, it's not as good imaging as MRIRCT, so it's not used for that anymore.

But it was.

And so I went to see if anybody seen effects on the, on the brain.

And this guy up at Arizona State named Jamie Tyler had been studying animals.

He did some amazing work in animals implanting electrodes and then hitting with ultrasound and seeing electrophysiological effects or like stimulating here and seeing the paw over here and move, that sort of thing.

And so I said, well, that's pretty cool.

And I, I, I used to run our chronic pain clinic in anaesthesia.

And so I said to my, my friends, I said, you know, we should try this on our, our pain patients because they're depressed.

They're all depressed.

And this might, you know, give them a mood lift and they go, yeah, that's a great idea, Hammer.

Hammer was my name in anesthesia.

So if I put him to sleep with a hammer and great idea hammer, you know, you got a nice shaved head.

This was your idea.

Why don't you go ahead and do it and we'll just watch, you know?

And they called my bluff and I said, OK, I guess I got to do it.

So one day at the end of the day, we sat around a table and we'll do the machine and put some of this goop on my head and held it to my head and, and turned on the machine and I didn't feel anything.

And I held there for about 15, maybe 30 seconds.

I, I put it down.

I was kind of kind of disappointed.

But then about a minute later I got a buzz and I was buzzed for like 2 hours.

I felt really energized, invigorated, creative and came back the next day and said we got to, we got to do this study.

And so we did.

And it was published in early 2013.

And in Brain stimulation, the first study ever on ultrasound effects on human mental states.

Human.

Yeah, mental states of any kind consciousness.

And and Jamie Tyler, who had done all this work that I had, you know, in, in animals.

I became friends with him later.

And he he sent me a nice e-mail.

Congratulations.

You have the first human study.

And now there's been hundreds, if not thousands actually.

But the neuroscientist got into it and they took advantage of the fact ultrasound could be focused.

And when I did mine, it was kind of scanning, like a scanning ultrasound.

And I didn't know what to focus on anyway, you know, frontal cortex maybe.

But but then they said neuroscientists like the idea you could, you could target the anterior simulator, the prefrontal cortex or the Q anywhere, you know, but the patient needs an MRI.

You need to stereotype your frame to aim at something.

And, and it gets real expensive and technological, but opens the eye, you know, opens the eye up for intellectual property and you can invent this and that.

So they all got into it.

And so most of the stuff, and then they also do it at different intensities.

You can do it at high intensity to cause lesions.

And I read recently that Bezos and Peter Thiel are starting a big effort to do surgery, particularly neurosurgery with ultrasound.

So instead of cutting that patient open, you, you ZAP the tumor.

And if you use two beams where they intersect, intersect in the brain, you could target the tumor and really fry it and without damaging anything on the way.

And I think that'd be great, but I don't want to, I don't want to use them for destructive relations.

At medium doses, you can open the blood brain barrier and you can you can get drugs into the brain that otherwise couldn't get in.

You may.

And sometimes you put them in these micro bubbles and they get into the brain.

You can ask.

Yeah, just we, we were got a little bit of time left and I wanted to get into the implications of what I mean, basically, if I understand what your theory is saying is that consciousness preceded possibly life and potentially guided the evolution of, you know, human life, life on planet Earth, maybe elsewhere, and that we may be living in a conscious universe.

And I was hoping that maybe you could expound upon that idea because it's something I'm sort of fond of thinking about.

And it's a tradition that's been alive throughout a lot of, you know, human endeavour throughout the human history.

So can you talk a little bit about that?

OK, well I skipped over something very important.

I was talking about Rodger, Rodger Penrose, because when he was trying in the second-half of Emperor's New Mind, he was trying to explain the quantum mechanism that, you know, the basically the measurement problem where things can be in superposition in multiple possible States and locations.

But when you try to measure them or observe them, they collapse to one or the other.

So they say the wave function collapses and that's using quantum computer quantum computing.

You have multiple possibilities called quantum bits or qubits, and they collapse.

All the possibilities collapse to one of the to to 1 value and that's the, the solution.

So they're using quantum computing, but when you make the measurement, you introduce randomness.

First thing Rodger did was first say, well, how the heck can things be in multiple states or places at the same time?

Superposition and entanglement are the two biggest mysteries, I think, and, and they're related.

And he, for superposition, he went to Einstein's general relativity, which says that mass is equivalent to curvature in space-time.

And Einstein did this for big objects like the sun.

And so he said, well, light from stars on the other side of the sun from us would be curved by the sun's mass and would be visible to us here on Earth, you know, during an eclipse or something, even though we knew they were behind the we should see them.

That was his prediction.

So in 1919, Arthur Eddington did the experiment, went to a mountaintop during an eclipse and sure.

And all saw these stars that were known to be at that time behind the sun.

And the sun's a space was curving space-time, so you could see them on Earth.

So Rodger applied that idea to quantum particles.

So instead of the sun, let's go to an electron or a proton or something, and it's going to have a tiny curvature.

And then you could imagine that if the perch on is here and also here, you'd have two tiny curvatures.

So you'd have a separation in space-time geometry.

And then you can imagine that if each each branch of that kept going, it would have its own universe.

And that gives you the many worlds hypothesis.

But Rodger said no, the superositions are unstable and after time T will collapse to one or the other.

And, and this was the real kicker.

When that happened, it would give you a moment of consciousness now or Bing when the collapse occurred after time t = H bar over E sub G basically the uncertainty principle, the quantum and Heisenberg uncertainty principle, indeterminacy principle and variation of that.

And that would give you a moment of consciousness.

The reason was the rationale for saying that's where consciousness was, was that, well, it had to come from somewhere and number and, but the main point was Girdle's theorem that you needed something non computable that had to be collapsed of the wave function.

So if that was your source of non computability and it's essential for consciousness, it also must be the, the source of qualia and feelings and, and this and that is a property of fundamental space-time geometry.

And, and that's what I got out of.

In fact we wrote a paper in our 2nd paper 96 we specifically made the connection to the hard problem being quite embedded in space-time geometry.

Now to your question, I think where you were going was let me let me skip ahead because in around 2000 people started discovering these near death and out of body experiences after people had cardiac arrests.

And Pin von Lumble in Netherlands and Peter Fennick in UK both did big studies on cardiac arrests and interviewed the patients afterwards, the ones who survived.

And 17%, both groups reported these bizarre near death and our body experiences, which were bizarre, but they were very consistent among different people and between the two groups.

And now many groups, probably hundreds, thousands of studies all over the the world.

And this actually goes back ancient times describing the same thing.

It turns out I didn't know that at the time, but what they described is, you know, a white light, a tunnel, seeing deceased relatives, a sense of calm.

And a lot of doctors say, well, you know, it's, it's all hypoxic.

The brain's hypoxic, man.

I've seen a lot of hypoxic patients and they're not calm.

They're anxious as hell and and confused.

So that doesn't make sense.

And, and we've also seen end of life brain activity when, when we have these brain monitors on people, when they die, that there could be a, a zero brain activity, then a burst of activity after the heart stop.

So in 2003, BBC did a show about these near death, not body experiences.

And they asked Peeman and Peter, well, how would you explain this?

And they both said, well, we have no idea, but ask Pet and Rose and Hammer off because they have this crazy idea about space-time geometry.

And Rodger said no thank you because he's wise enough to not get into these things and he can mention it.

It's credibility.

But anyway, I said, well, it could be that when the the blood cells flowing, the oxygen runs out, that the quantum information around the microtubule in the microtubule kind of dissipates the universe at large, but remains untangled as something like a quantum soul and can exist in space-time geometry.

Maybe find another set of microtubules for reincarnation or maybe persistent.

Definitely.

Or the patient that resuscitated go back, go back in SO.

Matrix for the soul.

Basically like a a medium for the soul to exist within.

Yeah, the quantum soul.

That was the name of our paper.

I wrote a paper about it with Deepak Chopra.

Actually the I, you know, I came up with the the science idea and he had all this knowledge about near death, not about experiences and mystical experience, mystical experiences and astral projection and all this kind of stuff.

All of which, and you know, remote viewing the CIA does did all of that as bizarre as it is as possible.

If consciousness is happening in space-time geometry, which is non local and can be entangled.

So I think, I think that's, that's probably what happens actually.

And you don't like a lot of people when I was young, I my dream was, well, I want to understand consciousness so I can be immortal and park my consciousness in some kind of device.

And I don't care about that anymore.

I I'll just take my chances the old fashioned way because I think it's it's quite lately likely and so I don't have to worry about it.

Yeah, one of the things I saw too.

Sorry David, do you have any question you wanted to ask?

I jumped.

On we can, we can come back to it.

I had a question about about neurons and brains, but we can come back to that later if there's time.

OK.

I just wanted to ask one of the things that I'd seen in previous interview is that you said that in the early periods of the universe or prior to the development of life on Earth at least, that there was a proto conscious events that happened.

And that perhaps an experience of happiness in these proto conscious events may have led to sort of a a snowball effect that eventually manifested in a more complex form of consciousness.

And there's been a line throughout mystical history with philosophers and what not talking about the central power of love in the universe.

And it seems to me that love slash happiness, some sort of deep motivational feeling that may have emerged in the early universe through these proto consciousness events, maybe precisely what those folks are are talking about.

But.

I I wrote a paper about this in in 2017.

I was asked to write a chapter in a book, A Man in His Nature about humanity and more of a philosophical approach.

And I realized that Rodgers objective reduction can happen in space-time without any matter at all or around a proton or something simple.

And it would be a very and it's probably happening in the micro environment all around us all the time, you know, in the table and the air and the computer and part of your body that isn't conscious everywhere.

But because a quantum superposition is going to happen, it's very quickly going to run into another quantum superposition and before too long it's going to reach the threshold time t = H bar over V sub G.

It's going to have a moment of objective reduction collapse and a moment of of subjective phenomenal experience.

However, it would be random because it's in the random micro environment.

It would be disconnected.

It would happen and that would be the end of it.

There would be no memory, there'd be no context, there'd be probably no meaning.

So we call it proto proto conscious or that was Roger Stern proto consciousness.

And so there's this background proto conscious noise everywhere.

Presumably, of course, we don't know it, We don't recognize it doesn't affect us in any way.

But just like all the other quantum stuff that's happening.

But, and it's kind of like metaphorically, like if you, you go to the Symphony and you hear the musicians tuning their instruments before the performance.

And you know, it's kind of to me who's not musically trained, it's like noise.

You hear all these different tone noise basically sounds and and then the orchestra starts and it's music.

So what the brain does, what the microtubules do is convert the proto conscious noise to consciousness.

Now in, in this chap.

So I wrote this, I wrote this chapter about the the origin of life because that's that's another mystery.

And I never really understood how life would start and develop for 100 million years before genes to kind of guide behavior in some way.

And even even with genes, doesn't you know you have problems.

But so I wondered whether feelings were there from the beginning.

Now most people would would say that feelings emerged much later due to complexity, like with brains.

So that means we had to get from, you know, for origin of life.

I don't know how many billion, I forgot how many billion years to brains, which are fairly recent.

And you know, and if you look at all these simple organisms, they're doing purposeful behaviors, intelligent behaviors with their microtubules.

But why?

What's their motivation?

Why would a molecule organize itself or do anything purposeful fighting entropy to survive?

Why would it bother to survive if it didn't have it didn't have any feelings?

So it seemed to me that feelings must be there right from the get go.

And with Rogers mechanism they sure could because he had a mechanism for it and it could happen between two benzene rings.

Minimally you want more in what happens faster?

Excuse me, but so anyway, I wrote this, wrote this article the quantum nature, the quantum origin of life, how the brain evolved to feel good and in and I, I described how these OR proto conscious events could be happening in the random environment.

And to describe the the primordial soup operand and Haldane and these aromatic molecules, the same benzene like actually dopamine like molecules, we put a tail on it, you got dopamine.

The pleasure molecule would be in these micelles and they would coalesce just like the protein folding and start oscillating and would eventually have a reach the threshold, have a conscious moment, which at least initially would be proto conscious and could be any kind of feeling, but at least occasionally some would be would feel good.

Now you said love and, and some other things.

I just used pleasure and I would it's kind of a generic term that certainly love would would work and but anything positive that you want more of, right, That's the key.

And that that the molecules would then organize themselves to optimize pleasure or optimize love, whatever you want to call it, and would, would develop and grow.

And then they learn to defend themselves and find food to keep going so they can have more pleasure and love.

And they'd avoid predators because that feels the opposite of of good.

And that's how life life started to optimize feelings, pleasure, love, whatever you want to call it and avoid displeasure.

And I think, I think that drove early early behavior, early life development and continues.

I mean, in a way, everything we do is based on optimizing our feelings over some time scale, you know, moment to moment, hedonistic or altruistic or long term, you know, delay your gratification, go to school so you can have more love and pleasure later, however you wanted to define it.

But really, really everything we do is to optimize feelings, I think.

And I think that's that's probably still true.

So, and it's all because and it's all embedded and coded in space-time geometry, yeah.

Did you have any follow up questions before we wrap it up, David?

It might to, to see if we can tie all of all of that together.

The the question that I was thinking about earlier, it's just something to to clarify and I think Stuart, you've spoken to it already, but wondering if we could close the loop.

It always struck me that the, the microtubule story is it's sub neuronal, but when we're talking about consciousness, we're, we're, it seems like we're talking about a like a brain level event.

And so you were referring to entanglements and, and maybe resonance between frequencies.

Did you have a?

Did you have a mechanism for as to how you go from something that is occurring at the level of the neuron and then coordinating the entire brain?

Well, entanglement microtubules and can be entangled, I think within a neuron and between neurons and probably across the brain and maybe between a brain and another brain somewhere else in parapsychology, things like that or between a brain and and something.

So entanglement distance doesn't seem to matter.

And once they're, you're entangled, you're entangled.

So and an honor bond has shown in in cell culture that measuring megahertz and gigahertz inside neurons, that there's communication from neuron to neuron in megahertz and gigahertz and gigahertz that controls neuronal firing more so than do the membrane potentials.

So it's a deeper, A deeper system includes quantum and somewhere in that, you know, kHz, megahertz, gigahertz, terahertz, it's kind of like music with different scales and it can go up and down and and somewhere you're going to cross cross that the threshold and have a conscious moment.

So consciousness can be like notes and chords in this music, like hierarchy.

And if you go faster, faster event, it's more you get more intense experience and more quantum, non local.

And I think, you know, meditation, psychedelics, all these things take you to a deeper level.

You get more non locality, more quantum and more connected to stuff outside you, you know, in your brain and outside your brain.

And eventually, you know, when our bodies die, we probably just go there completely and, and are distributed.

And I think there's a good chance that that consciousness of the brain is a hologram.

And what you need is interference kind of.

So one thing that is so when we just when we said, OK, 10 megahertz is the frequency for, for Orca war events, but that's too fast for cognition.

I mean, most of you know, what we do interacting with the outside world is, is more in EEG frequencies, you know, 10 Hertz, something like that.

So how do you get from from megahertz to 10 Hertz, let's say?

And I remember having this discussion on the phone with Roger and we're running our 2014 paper.

And by then, Anerbahn had discovered the megahertz oscillations for megahertz.

And also having the very fast megahertz made it easy for us because you only had to avoid decoherence for 10 to the 10 to the -7 seconds as opposed to 25 milliseconds if you want to say it was for 40 Hertz, which would have been unrealistic.

So I remember he said, he said, well, maybe there's negative resonance.

I'm going negative.

This is, you know, like interference beats like a music.

And I said, oh, so you mean like if there's two microtubules and strangely enough in dendrites and soma of neurons and only in dendrites and soma of neurons in all the biology, the microtubules are not continuous in the same polarity.

They're in mixed polarities.

So one's going up, one's going down.

So if this and they're in the same voltage, this one's going to oscillate slightly different frequency than this one.

And you're going to have AB frequency.

So this one's going to be at let's say 10.004 megahertz.

This could be 10.000 megahertz.

They're going to have AB frequency at 40 Hertz.

And that's going to give you.

So I, we, we proposed that the EEG is actually due to B frequencies of much faster vibrations and microtubules.

And people thought we were totally out of our minds.

But then I would answer, well, how do you explain EEG?

Because after all these years, we really don't have an effing clue what EEG means, what it's all about.

There's an excellent paper by a guy named Michael X Cone from 2019, something like the EEG, Where does it come from?

What does it really mean?

And and it points out all the stuff that we don't really know.

I mean, yeah, you know, I read Busaki's book The Rhythms of the Brain, and, you know, alpha comes from this pacemaker and Theta comes from this circuit and this and that.

He had no idea about 40 Hertz.

But they don't really know.

And there's no, there's no grain unified theory of EEG except ours.

We would say that EEG is actually B frequencies, a much faster vibrations and microtubules and nobody even acknowledges that.

But they don't have a better explanation for what EEG is, unless it's just all all random and doesn't don't relate to each other, but that would seem a little unusual for me.

To me that that it's not some kind of organized system, they're just looking at the wrong frequency.

I think you need to look faster.

Love it.

I let's end it real.

I mean with one more brief.

Question.

What are you expecting coming up in terms of your theory that may provide more progress or what's the thing that you're anticipating most in terms of proving?

Is there any chance on the horizon that that might be coming your way or how do you see that working out?

Well, we keep working and looking for more evidence.

Anaban is building a, you know, there's a big thing now with AI.

Can AI be conscious?

And they're trying to convince us that it will be that.

You know, even Chalmers is throwing the hard problem under the bus and says that it's inevitable.

Of course, he confuses carbon chemistry with organic chemistry.

But anyway, I don't think silicon can do it.

But if you really, I mean, the best way to do it would be to copy the brain, right?

So what Auerbach's doing, he developed something called brain Jelly, which is a, a organic gel that self organizes into helical oscillators.

And in his view, the key to it's kind of like microtubules where you have helic and you mentioned DNA helical oscillators.

And then the, the, the oscillators, the aromatic rings line up and they oscillate and that you get frolic coherence and stuff like that.

So this brain Jelly self organizes into a system of helical oscillators that interact on their own.

And he interfaces with them with the, I think microwave and optics.

I forget which is the input, which is the output.

And he's building A and he's got a 1024 qubit design for a organic warm temperature self organizing quantum computer, organic quantum computer that he's building.

And he just got another 25 million from the Indian government.

And that's not a lot of money in, in this AI, quantum AI thing.

But you know, India, they're, they, they look at it as the way to kind of leapfrog over all the expensive cold temperature Google AI type approach where you have to ultra cool everything and, and then you lose any, any connection to biology.

So they think they're going to leapfrog that with their organic warm temperature.

You don't have to cool.

It solves a lot of problems.

And not to mention the fact that these AI systems to power these LLMS use an enormous amount of energy.

And we've already got enough problems with energy in our world.

So I like the organic approach and I predicted that will be the first potentially conscious AI.

I'm sure it'll be a period of they're claiming it's conscious and we don't know but well, but I think at least whatever the output of that thing will be, it'll probably be sensitive to anesthesia because the the quantum oscillation of the aromatic rings are essentially what happens in our brains.

And maybe you asked me at the beginning, but people always ask, well, don't let's have a definition before we explain consciousness.

And there's no good definition.

I mean, the best definition I have is what goes away with anesthesia and comes back when the anesthesia is gone.

So if Honorbound's quantum computer does that, then I guess we have to decide whether, you know, is it conscious or not?

And I don't know, we'll have to fight about that at that time.

But that's going on.

I think the other thing that's that.

So I'm working now in astrobiology.

When I wrote that paper about the origin of life, it was picked up by Doctor Loretta, who's the planetary scientist here at the University of Arizona, and he was in charge of this mission to an asteroid he called Bennu.

It was a 20 year NASA mission brought back organic molecules.

We're analyzing for quantum oscillations.

We see quantum oscillations in these and, and they're the basically the same aromatic rings that we've been talking about.

The the space is full of them.

They're produced by stars.

Interstellar dust is full of aromatic rings.

They're floating around they're you can wipe them off the windshield of the space station and they're probably floating down on us now and there.

And there's almost no doubt that the origin of that they are the origin of life aromatic rings from elsewhere because initially they had to come from, from from space, you know, pan sperm and stuff like that.

But it's, but they don't have to be organized.

You just need the aromatic rings.

So anyway, we while we're waiting for the Bender samples, there's a a molecule that came from a meteorite that fell in Australia in 1969 called the Murchison molecule, just kind of a bouquet of aromatic rings with 35 rings.

And it was kind of A2 dimensional because of like a pressed flower.

The pictures picture been in the literature since 1969.

And we sent it to Enderman and said, could you model this in 3D, you know, kind of like protein folding?

And he did and it turned into an oscillator in, in Petahertz.

And we think it might be the, it might be the ground state of a, of a time crystal as the origin of life.

So if you, if you, if you started with a, an oscillator and it started having proto conscious moments, including pleasure or love, then it would grow and get larger, but then it would also get slower because you have more mass.

So you not only have petahertz, then you'd have terahertz and then it'd get bigger and you'd have gigahertz and then eventually you'd have a microtubule.

And so we're Honor Bond and Dante and I are just, we just are submitting a paper on microtubules as time crystals and what that would solve for consciousness and life.

And I think that's going to be.

So time crystals were were well, spatial crystals, you know, they're repeating in space-time crystals, you have dynamic patterns repeat in time.

So you can have the same dynamics in, let's say Hertz, kHz, megahertz, gigahertz, terahertz, which is exactly what we found what on and bound found in microtubules and time crystals were proposed theoretically by Wilcheck, who won the Nobel Prize for, for something else and have been implemented in the last few years in various types of cold quantum systems.

And we're proposing it in a warm biological system, which is a big ask.

But we, we've already got the evidence.

We've already got the data.

I mean, that came first in this case.

And we had to figure out what, what are we dealing with?

And we figured, well, shit, it's a time crystal.

That's pretty much the definition.

So we think that we hope and think that the time crystal concept will turn out to be very important in the origin of life and consciousness.

And maybe the final point I'll close on is that I was the relationship between life and consciousness and somebody, somebody, maybe it was Deepak or somebody at Deepak's conference, told me in the Upanishads that consciousness was there first and got bored and invented life as a vehicle for more experiences.

And I think that that might sort of be true, that that life is a vehicle for consciousness.

And it's not that consciousness evolved from life.

Life evolved to optimize consciousness.

A little bit of that and it turns the whole question on.

Its head right I mean.

It's like you don't have to worry.

About all the complexity that gives raise to consciousness, because consciousness was complexity is just an overused, abused.

Sorry, I mean, it's like the it's not a solution, it's not the answer to anything.

And I spent a lot of time in complexity chaos theory with a guy named Alvin Scott, who wrote a wonderful book called The Stair Word of the Mind about emergence theory and consciousness.

And when I started working with, with, with Rodger, he couldn't, he, he had been looking for the Devadav soliton his whole career and he couldn't quite buy the, he never found it, which is a quantum mechanism.

So he, he was kind of resistant to that.

So we parted a ways scientifically.

We made really good friends.

But so I'm familiar with emergence and complex and I think it's they're just beating it to to death to explain something that they cannot explain any other way.

Well, I appreciate your time, Sir, and thank you for a fascinating discussion.

And a whirlwind tour through all of your work.

So thank you so much.

Thank you both very much.

My pleasure.

Good, good job.

Good questions.