Synopsis of the article:

“Consciousness in the universe. A review of the „Orch OR‟ theory”

By Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose

The eminent British scientist Roger Penrose, working in Oxford, and the American

anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, professor at the University of Arizona have

developed a tentative theory of consciousness that has raised much interest called

Orchestrated Objective Reduction theory, (Orch OR theory). This paper is the most

recent, technical extensive and detailed account of their theory.

The Orch OR theory studies the hypothesis that consciousness arises from quantum

effects in certain protein polymers called “microtubules” located inside the brain‟s

neurons. These effects would control neuronal firings. According to Penrose‟s ideas,

the quantum mechanical collapse of the wave function is an actual phenomenon

triggered by the gravitational interaction. Generically, the collapse of the wave

function happens spontaneously and in a disordered manner, anytime a certain

threshold of gravitational potential energy is attained. In the brain, this collapse can

happen in an “orchestrated” manner over macroscopic scales. In other words, the

brain could contain structure capable of controlling and making use of the

wave function collapse mechanism.

There are two distinct remarkable aspects of this theory. The first is that it explores a

concrete possibility of the effect of quantum mechanics on the brain. The second is

more wide: Hameroff and Penrose present this theory as an alternative to the

interpretation of consciousness as a large scale phenomenon that emerges from

complex computation among brain neurons, computation whose currency is seen as

neuronal firings („spikes‟) and synaptic transmissions alone, sometime equated, by a

loose analogy, to the binary „bits‟ in digital computing. Instead, in Hameroff‟s words

“Consciousness is more like music than computation.”

The underlying idea, detailed in the paper, is that consciousness is a physical

phenomenon, but physics has a wider scope than what it appears in its most

reductive and mechanistic interpretation; in particular, the physical world can include

a diffuse “proto-consciousness”, from which the more complex forms of animal and

human consciousness can emerge. More precisely, in their words: Consciousness

results from discrete physical events; such events have always existed in the

universe as non-cognitive, proto-conscious events, these acting as part of precise

physical laws not yet fully understood.

Penrose and Hameroff present this as a third alternative with respect to the

conventional alternative between: (A) Science/Materialism, with consciousness

emerging from known physics and having no distinctive role. (B) Dualism/Spirituality,

with consciousness being radically distinct than the rest of the natural world, and

outside the scope of science.

The hypothesis that Penrose and Hameroff explore in detail in the paper is that the

microtubules in the brain exploit a manifestation of such a “proto-consciousness” in

order to ground the formation of human consciousness.