Roger Penrose is a Nobel prize winning mathematical physicist whose most important contribution was work on black holes in relation to the theory of general relativity. But he’s getting old and so he decided to think about the nature of consciousness and he has come to the conclusion that the phenomenon of human consciousness is caused by quantum effects generated in the cells of the human brain.
Wow!
If you watch the video, you’ll get a little information how the flow of chemicals in the microtubules or even the shaping of the atoms in the tubulin that makes up the tubules might be responsible for the quantum effects that provide the indeterminacy necessary to make human brain more than just a computer running a program. Penrose equates that quantum indeterminacy with the basis of human consciousness.
Wow!
Okay, maybe that’s an interesting idea. Is it true? Damned if I know.
But I do like the fact that it gives us a way of saying that computers won’t have consciousness. Lots of people think that if we just make a computer big enough, then it will suddenly develop consciousness because humans have consciousness and we have the best brains in the biological hierarchy.
Of course maybe if we can build indeterminacy into computers maybe they’ll become conscious. Will that happen when the size of the circuits on the chips become so small that the actual paths that the electrons take become indeterminate? I guess that’s possible. We can make the AI as flawed as we ourselves are. Maybe we’ll be able to make them neurotic or bi-polar or even psychotic if we want. That’s kind of what happened to HAL 9000. He became psychotic because he was forced to lie about the mission that was such an important part of his self-image.
And maybe that’s possible. But somehow I don’t think complexity makes consciousness. We “know” we have consciousness. But is that because we have giant brains? Dogs don’t have giant brains but try to convince any dog owner that his pet isn’t conscious. He’ll laugh you out of the room. I don’t think consciousness is a synonym for intelligence. I think consciousness is a synonym for life. We’re conscious. Dogs are conscious. Even mice are conscious. Are mosquitoes conscious? How about protozoans. What about our individual cells?
I’m guessing the all are. Obviously, a rotifer isn’t spinning around a pond saying, “I rotifer, therefore I am.” But I think he knows he’s there in some sense. Does that mean he has indeterminate microtubules providing him with agency? Well, maybe it has nothing to do with quantum effects but for whatever reason, In some minimal sense, I think the answer is yes! Consciousness equals life.
Now don’t ask me if viruses have consciousness. I’m not going to bring this down to individual DNA and RNA molecules. That would make my head hurt. But I believe that life is life and it is all of a piece. And whatever we have that is called consciousness is only the most exquisite version of what every other creature has writ small.
Whether God created quantum mechanics to allow us to have agency or whether the actual mechanism of our souls is completely impossible to reverse engineer by any human intelligence is unknown and probably unknowable. What has already become apparent over the course of the last four hundred years of scientific investigation is that the more we learn the more we learn that we know absolutely nothing.
Isaac Newton “knew” what kept the Moon in orbit and how to calculate the orbits of the planets to whatever accuracy he needed. He had discovered God’s textbook for his creation.
James Clarke Maxwell knew what the equations were that governed electromagnetism and ushered in the modern age of electric power.
Albert Einstein decoded time-space and “corrected” Newton’s laws.
But a generation later, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle forever locked the door on our knowledge of the quantum world. We invented quarks and gluons and muons and who knows what else. But every time we learn something new we find out that ten other things are just illusions. Dark matter and dark energy and string theory and who knows what else crowd around the dark corners of the forefront of our knowledge and we still know less than nothing about ourselves and why we’re here.
Well, I’m okay with that. Just as long as we’re not kidding ourselves about where we stand with respect to our dogs. They’re our friends meant to keep us from taking ourselves too seriously.