Anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff has recently written an article with the title "Consciousness Is the Collapse of the Wave Function." The article is a rambling mishmash of physics, chemistry and neuroscience that completely fails to provide anything resembling a credible notion for how a brain could produce awareness.
Hameroff discusses a theory advanced about 20 years ago by him and physicist Roger Penrose, what is called the Orchestrated Objective Reduction theory. The theory has been basically ignored by the scientific world, and it rather seems that almost no one seems to believe in it other than Penrose and Hameroff. The theory claims that consciousness is produced by some tiny units called microtubules.
Microtubules are units inside neurons, and each neuron has many of them. The function of microtubules is known: they serve to provide structural support for a neuron, and also help transport chemicals. Claiming that they also provide consciousness rather reminds me of that classic Saturday Night Live sketch in which someone claims that his floor wax is also a dessert topping.
Hameroff makes the untrue claim that something has taken place to lend credibility to this theory. He states this:
"Penrose suggested that wavefunctions collapse spontaneously and in the process give rise to consciousness. Despite the strangeness of this hypothesis, recent experimental results suggest that such a process takes place within microtubules in the brain."
What are these recent experimental results? The article does not tell us. The article has no reference or link to any scientific paper. It merely has a link to a Wikipedia.org article on something called superradiance, an article saying nothing about the mind or consciousness. Hameroff's claim that experimental results support his theory is untrue, and his failure to cite or link to such results suggests his statement is groundless.
The article is a classic example of using what I call the Mixture Method, a method I describe in my post "The Mixture Method Works Wonders When Selling Speculation as Science." The method consists of mixing up speculations with either scientific facts or mathematics or a combination of the two, usually in a way so that the speculative parts are a relatively small part of the paper or article. The goal is to kind of give a scientific flavor or a scientific sound to some claim that is speculative. Often the scientific facts cited are irrelevant to the speculations made, or have only a tangential relation to them.
A long section of Hameroff's article suggests that he is mainly just spouting irrelevant facts to give some scientific sound to his speculation. Beginning with his sentence "light is the part of the electromagnetic spectrum that can be seen by the eyes of humans and animals – visible light," and ending with his probably incorrect sentence "These micelles somehow developed into functional cells, and then multi-cellular organisms, long before genes," we have more than 500 words mentioning things that are all irrelevant to the claim made in his title, and all irrelevant to the issue of how people have consciousness. The discussion is a very jumbled hodgepodge of scientific facts and irrelevant observations, bouncing all over the place, going from the early universe to facts of chemistry to speculations about the origin of life to mention of mystical experiences. Irrelevant scientific facts are being cited at great length, to help give some scientific sound to some speculation that is metaphysical.
When you're following the mixture method, it helps if one of the scientific topics mentioned is an extremely obscure topic. That way you can mention some deep-sounding scientific topic, and people will probably fail to notice how such a mention is irrelevant to your speculation. The deep scientific topic mentioned is the collapse of the wave function. The wave function is some mathematical concept that comes up in the abstruse field of quantum mechanics. Supposedly a wave function "collapses" when a measurement is made of a particle such as a photon or an electron.
That has nothing to do with consciousness, and nothing to do with minds. When people try to drag the collapse of the wave function into a discussion of the origin of consciousness, what goes on seems to go like this:
(1) The hi-tech type of physicist measurement occurring when wave functions collapse is stretched a hundred-fold, into the more general idea of "observation."
(2) "Observation" is then conflated with "consciousness." But observation is not consciousness. Security cameras observe things, and they are not conscious. And unconscious automated equipment can measure things.
Using the term "it is becoming apparent" for something for which there is zero evidence, Hameroff states this: "It is becoming apparent that consciousness may occur in single brain neurons extending upward into networks of neurons, but also downward and deeper, to terahertz quantum optical processes, e.g. 'superradiance' in microtubules, and further still to fundamental spacetime geometry (Figure 1)." The figure 1 is a diagram that very strangely shows us columns consisting of (1) a neuron; (2) microtubules in a neuron; (3) hypothetical bumps in spacetime. What is this superradicance being talked about? Penrose refers us to a wikipedia.org article on that topic, but the article makes no mention of biology or the brain. It merely mentions high-energy physics sources of superradiance such as hot gases, and astrophysical sources of superradiance.
The paper "Superradiance -- The 2020 Edition" is a 261-page physics paper on the topic of superradiance. The paper makes no mention of the brain, no mention of neurons, and no mention of cells, but it does talk a lot about black holes. It seems Hameroff has no business mentioning superradiance to try to support the claim that consciousness is produced by microtubules.
Here's a reality check: it's dark as the dark side of Pluto inside brains and inside microtubules. A scientific article gives us the truth about radiance from cells:
"Cifra and colleagues cultured millions of yeast cells in a light-tight chamber. The signal detected using photomultiplier tubes tends to be extremely weak: A photon emitted every 15 minutes per cell..Cifra is cautious about concluding whether these ultraweak emissions—he prefers the term 'biological auto-luminescence'—play a significant role in biological signaling, or if they are simply by-products...From a theory standpoint, Cifra says, the signals are simply too low to be used for communication."
Even if superradiance were to be occurring in microtubules, it would do nothing to show that microtubules or brains produce consciousness. Radiance and superradiance are physics phenomena, not mind phenomena. While people refer to "light of the mind" or "the light of consciousness," or a "mental illumination," they are merely being metaphorical. Light is no more consciousness than heat is consciousness.
Hameroff states, "I agree that consciousness is fundamental, and concur with Roger Penrose that it involves self-collapse of the quantum wavefunction, a rippling in the fine scale structure of the universe." It seems that Hameroff is bouncing around between three different ideas:
(1) the idea that consciousness is produced by microtubules;
(2) the idea consciousness is the collapse of a wave function;
(3) The idea that consciousness is produced by a rippling in the fine scale structure of the universe.
These are three different ideas, all groundless. Which one does Hameroff believe in? Apparently all three, as if he can't make up his mind. It sounds like Hameroff can't get his story straight.
According to mainstream understanding of quantum mechanics, a wave function collapse occurs only upon observation or measurement. There are no observations or measurements occurring within microtubules. So in the context of mainstream quantum mechanics, talking about wave function collapses within microtubules doesn't make sense. Of course, you can always play around with unorthodox theories of quantum mechanics, but doing that has produced some of the silliest statements of modern scientists, such as Hugh Everett's bat-bleep-crazy theory of some infinity of parallel universes.
Penrose and Hameroff found it necessary to become quantum theory heretics, by postulating the speculative idea that wave functions spontaneously collapse (instead of only occurring during measurement or observation). Maybe their thinking was rather like this: wave function collapses as we now understand them occur only with conscious observers, so if wave functions spontaneously collapse, they would produce conscious observers. No, they would not. If such spontaneous wave function collapses occurred, it would merely mean we need to revise the current prevailing idea that wave function collapses only occur with observation. Similarly, the fact that car crashes only occur with drivers gives you not the slightest warrant for thinking that spontaneous car crashes not involving observers (like two unmanned parking lot cars colliding) would somehow conjure up the sudden appearance of car drivers.
Thinkers such as Hameroff try to suggest that there can be quantum effects in the brain, and that the brain can act like a quantum computer. Such insinuations are futile in explaining human awareness. Computers can compute, but they are not aware, and have no consciouness. You can't compute your way to consciousness. Also, it is completely erroneous to think that you can show a brain could compute by showing some brain tissue acts like computer hardware. Computing inside a computer requires not just hardware but also computer sofware. Brains have nothing like the software in computers that enables computation.
I can give some advice for people trying to make some progress in understanding the human mind:
(1) Don't just study microtubules, but study the entire brain, studying at great length exceptional case histories of minds that performed well even with very little brain, and studying at great length the topic of neural shortfalls, all the ways in which the brain fails to have the physical characteristics we would expect it have if it were the source of our minds and the storage place of our memories. You can get such information by reading the posts at this blog.
(2) Don't study quantum mechanics or high-energy physics when trying to clarify the human mind, but do make a very thorough study of human mental phenomena, including a long and thorough study of the evidence for psi and observational reports of seemingly paranormal and currently inexplicable human experiences such as near-death experiences, hypnotic phenomena and out-of-body experiences.
(3) Do not become a fan of any theory that takes the futile, dead-end approach of merely trying to explain "consciousness" (a bloodless, stripped-down term suitable for describing the mind of an ant), and recognize the necessity for explaining the full range of human mental phenomena, including memory, thinking, personality, belief, understanding, self-hood, creativity, and the many well-observed and carefully documented anomalous mental phenomena that our professors should be paying very close attention to but senselessly ignore.
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