Does consciousness come from quantum processes in the brain?

Daniel and Kelly explore Penrose's Orchestrated Objective Reduction Theory that aims to explain consciousness, quantum measurements, quantum gravity and anaesthesia! See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Daniel Whiteson?

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.

• 0:04Speaker 01

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• 1:13Daniel Whiteson?

  What is more mysterious than consciousness? Where does our subjective experience come from? It's certainly a puzzle that has baffled philosophers for eons. But wait, what about quantum mechanics? That's a big puzzle, too. Why can quantum objects maintain a superposition, but classical objects, which are made from quantum objects, somehow cannot? And what's the difference between a quantum and classical object? Also a major source of philosophical confusion. But hold on a second. What about the conflicts between quantum mechanics and gravity? How can we have two beautiful theories, both of which have been stress-tested to an extraordinary level, but which clash in their basic description of the universe?

• 1:57Daniel Whiteson?

  Can they ever be harmonized? These three questions battle for supremacy in the world of philosophy and physics. Each one has been attacked from many sides, the greatest minds in history struggling to make concrete progress. But what if we could solve not just one, not just two, but all three with one theory? One idea that explains consciousness, quantum measurements, and harmonizes quantum mechanics with gravity? Today, we'll explore a controversial theory that claims to do just that and a little more. Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's extraordinarily ambitious universe.

• 2:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  Hello, I'm Kelly Weiner Smith. I study parasites and space. And today, we are talking about all of the topics that make Kelly's brain go ouch.

• 3:01Daniel Whiteson?

  Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I like to insert all of those topics into your brain, not to make your brain go ouch, but to make your brain go, oh.

• 3:13Kelly Weinersmith?

  Do you have a topic that makes your brain, just like when you hear about it, you immediately go ouch?

• 3:19Daniel Whiteson?

  Chemistry.

• 3:20Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, yeah, of course. But that's a whole field. I was, is there like a particular topic in chemistry that makes you go ouch?

• 3:27Daniel Whiteson?

  There's a topic in chemistry which overlaps with physics a little bit, which is statistical physics and thermodynamics. And it has the same issues for me as chemistry, that there are lots of different scenarios with different assumptions, which all need different formulas. And it's hard to sort out when you do what. And it's the one class in grad school, which I was terrified I was not going to pass.

• 3:49Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, does that mean you got an A minus?

• 3:51Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 3:55Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, Daniel.

• 3:56Daniel Whiteson?

  And the instructor for that was like a real old school Berkeley dude. He used to smoke cigars in his office at Berkeley. And like, there's a strict no smoking policy. But he had a strict ignore that no smoking policy, policy.

• 4:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  Good to have tenure.

• 4:13Daniel Whiteson?

  He was like 1,000 years old when I got to Berkeley. And yeah, he taught like it.

• 4:18Kelly Weinersmith?

  Does he still persist?

• 4:20Daniel Whiteson?

  I don't know. And actually, I was supposed to meet him. I took my final and I turned it in. And I was terrified about how it went. And he sent me a message saying, please come meet me. And I just didn't go.

• 4:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  Coward.

• 4:35Daniel Whiteson?

  Because I was so terrified, but I ended up getting an A minus in the class. And so whatever happened, happened. And I don't believe that he's any longer with us.

• 4:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, all right. Well, you turned out pretty okay. So that's awesome.

• 4:49Daniel Whiteson?

  As long as I focus on the particles and the tiny stuff and not like millions of buzzing things interacting, then yeah, it all makes sense to me. And my goal on this podcast is to make it all make sense to you, which is why we dig into complicated topics and we answer questions from listeners who want to understand crazy theories about the universe.

• 5:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, and one of the things that I love about being your co-host is that the topics that usually make my brain go ouch, definitely make my brain hurt less when you're explaining them to me. And so I have the best chance of understanding them on today's show. So let's go ahead. Today we're going to talk about, does consciousness come from quantum processes in the brain?

• 5:31Daniel Whiteson?

  That's right. It's a smoothie of all the hardest problems in the universe blended together with quantum gravity. And this is not a random topic that we have chosen. This is the subject of a theory by one of the smartest guys out there, Roger Penrose. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics for understanding black holes. So definitely a very smart dude. And he has this crazy theory about consciousness. And we got a question from a listener who asked us to explain it. Here's Scott's question.

• 6:01Speaker 04

  Aloha, Daniel and Kelly. Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff have hypothesized that the rise of consciousness, the hard question in neuroscience, comes from the collapse of quantum superpositions inside microtubules in neurons. To me, this sounds like a perfect crossover of quantum physics and biology. So I'd love to hear your explanation of and take on the orchestrated objective reduction theory.

• 6:30Daniel Whiteson?

  Thank you.

• 6:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right. So my question to you, Daniel, is this, is this another case of a physicist jumping into like biology and thinking, oh, this is lesser because it's biology. So I'm just gonna assume that I can do it without really doing any research?

• 6:47Daniel Whiteson?

  It's not quite so bad.

• 6:48Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 6:49Daniel Whiteson?

  He started out just thinking about the physics, the quantum mechanics of it.

• 6:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 6:54Daniel Whiteson?

  And then was thinking a little bit about the philosophy of it. And there's a terrible track record there of physicists doing philosophy without really knowing what they're doing. But Penrose, he's a smart guy. He's thought a lot about quantum foundations. So what he says on that topic is not just nonsense. And then he paired up with a biologist, an anesthesiologist, actually.

• 7:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 7:14Daniel Whiteson?

  Who helped him connect it to the brain. And so not only are we going to be talking about consciousness and quantum mechanics and quantum gravity and quantum computing, we're also going to touch on anesthesiology.

• 7:27Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, we don't understand any of those things. Amazing.

• 7:31Daniel Whiteson?

  So maybe they're all the same thing, right? This is the wonderful temptation. I see this from listeners all the time. They're like, you don't understand dark matter. You also don't understand antimatter. What if dot, dot, dot, dark matter is antimatter? And I totally get that temptation because there are times in the history of science when two things we didn't understand click together perfectly to make one beautiful thing we do understand. And so what a great moment that would be. Dark matter is not antimatter, unfortunately. And the jury's still out on whether Penrose's theory of consciousness makes any sense.

• 8:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right. Well, speaking of making any sense, let's see if this question makes any sense to our extraordinaries because you went ahead and asked them, does consciousness come from quantum processes in the brain? Let's hear what they had to say.

• 8:18Speaker 05

  The choices I make are not deterministic. Therefore, I'm in favor of a quantum explanation of consciousness.

• 8:26Speaker 06

  Yes, I believe so.

• 8:28Speaker 07

  I'm speaking with ignorance here, but consciousness, I believe, doesn't come from the quantum processes that.

• 8:36Speaker 07

  Embedded in the brain, perhaps it has something to do with the virtual particle popping in at our distance.

• 8:43Speaker 06

  My first reaction is no, we can't even agree on what consciousness is. But since it's biology, I'd have to say we don't really know. Everything comes from quantum processes, but consciousness, who knows how?

• 8:57Speaker 08

  I think that quantum processes are at a different scale neurological processes.

• 9:02Speaker 09

  Perhaps that's how we achieve artificial general intelligence through the use of quantum computing. Well, I think at the end of the day, everything comes from quantum processes, but I'd still say yes. And neurons definitely rely on quantum processes.

• 9:18Speaker 10

  I would say yes because of the electricity in our brain, which I believe comes from the sun, which gave rise to life on Earth.

• 9:23Speaker 11

  I don't think so. The amount of entanglement juice needed to power the flux capacitor in the brain would be too much for this task.

• 9:30Speaker 12

  I don't think so. I think consciousness comes from feedback loops.

• 9:34Speaker 04

  I suspect that Daniel's answer is no, because the brain is too wet of an environment.

• 9:42Speaker 08

  The mush inside our skulls is quantum and quantum consciousness comes from that.

• 9:48Speaker 13

  Quantum mechanics is inherently tied to chemistry and the way that the brain works is all based on chemistry. So I'd say, yeah, definitely.

• 9:55Daniel Whiteson?

  I do not know, but that's a great theory.

• 9:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  Now, no one respects the extraordinaries more than me, but I'm going to go ahead and say that a lot of these answers made no sense at all.

• 10:09Daniel Whiteson?

  I mean, the question is kind of bonkers, but I do love the flux capacitor answer, like nice reference.

• 10:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, yep, yep.

• 10:18Daniel Whiteson?

  And the person who sent back their file with the title, quan-ssness, which I can't believe that's not a word, like that's an awesome word, quan-ssness.

• 10:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  It should be a word, yes, now it is.

• 10:29Daniel Whiteson?

  And let me clarify something which was brought up by a few of the listeners, like, what does it mean to be quantum, right? Quantum processes. In a sense, everything is quantum because we're all made from quantum objects, right? I'm made out of particles, those particles are quantum. So in that sense, I'm quantum and my whole process relies on being quantum. All of biology is quantum because biology is just big chemistry and chemistry is just big physics. So in that sense, it's a silly question because the answer is always, yes, it's quantum. But that's not really what we mean. Sometimes when you zoom out from quantum processes, the quantumness of it all averages out. Like when you have a baseball and you throw it across the field, yes, it's made out of 10 to the 29 quantum objects obeying the Schrödinger equation, but you don't need

• 11:14Daniel Whiteson?

  to know quantum mechanics to describe it because all of the interest in quantumness averages out and you can just use classical physics. And so what we're asking here today is not, are we made out of quantum objects? The answer to that is obviously yes. The question is, is it crucial that we're made out of quantum objects? Is the quantumness of those objects somehow propagate up to our consciousness and our experience and our free will in an important way?

• 11:39Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay. So we've set that groundwork, but now, all right, I'm going to read our question one more time.

• 11:46Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes.

• 11:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  Here is our question. Our question is, does consciousness come from quantum processes in the brain?

• 11:55Daniel Whiteson?

  Right.

• 11:55Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay. So first, let's unpack the word consciousness. And we actually have a whole episode with Dr. Megan Peters where we talked about consciousness, what it means, what we understand about it. You can go check that out, but we're going to summarize it here a little bit. So Daniel, for starters, what is the hard problem of consciousness?

• 12:15Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, exactly. So in order to understand Penrose's theory, we have to figure out first what it's solving. And there's multiple problems it's solving. The first one is consciousness. And so the hard problem with consciousness is essentially saying, why do I have an experience? Why is it something there's like to be me, right? Like, I feel like I'm in my body and it's not just that photons hit my eyeball and send a message to my brain. I experience red. And red is like, there's something reddish about red in a way that like, I can't describe to you completely. This is famous thought experiment about a woman who lives only in

• 12:56Daniel Whiteson?

  a room filled with black and white objects. Could you describe red to her in a way that when she leaves the room, she could identify red from blue in any way other than showing her something red? Right? It tries to probe why there is an experience of being you, why a complex series of things in your brain emerges somehow to you having a first person experience? Because as far as I know, a rock doesn't have a first person experience, a car doesn't have a first person experience, an ant probably doesn't, you know, my AI probably doesn't. But where does that happen? How does that happen? That's the question of consciousness.

• 13:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  And I remember we had an interesting discussion with Meghan about, you know, should we be worried about whether or not AI does? Does an octopus have a first person experience? And how would we even try to measure that?

• 13:46Daniel Whiteson?

  Exactly. And measuring it is crucial because so many times in science, we begin by measuring something and then trying to explain it. We want to understand why an electron goes left and right. Well, we make some measurements and then the nature of those measurements are what we're trying to predict. And the fact that in quantum mechanics, those measurements are fuzzy is a whole issue in quantum mechanics. We'll talk about in a minute. But in consciousness, like, can I measure that? All I know is that I'm conscious. You tell me that you're conscious, but I can't measure your consciousness at all. And in philosophy, they have this famous thought experiment called philosophical zombie that says, for example, is it possible to have another version of Kelly who acts exactly

• 14:30Daniel Whiteson?

  the same way, claims to be conscious, acts as if she was, but isn't?

• 14:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  It's Kelly pre-coffee. That's what it is.

• 14:40Daniel Whiteson?

  Is there something about consciousness which can be measured from the outside? Or is it purely an internal interior thing? And if it's purely internal and interior, like I think it is, then it's by construction not measurable, which means it might be outside the bounds of science. It might be purely in the realm of philosophy. I don't mean that in a negative way at all. It's just that science can only answer questions about things that we can predict and experiment on. And so things that we can't are philosophical questions, which doesn't mean they're less valid. Sometimes it means they're bigger picture questions, but it does limit us in how we probe them and understand them.

• 15:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, so now I'm particularly interested in how a physicist is going to address this question of consciousness, if it's a thing we can't even really measure.

• 15:25Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, and this connects also not just to consciousness, but also to free will, right? Like this feeling we have of being inside our heads and sort of driving our bodies. I decide to have coffee, I decide not to have coffee, I decide what to talk about on this podcast. You know, where's the room for that in our physical understanding of the universe? Is it just part of the physical systems that we are made out of? That we sort of draw a dotted line around and say, this is the decision making part? This is me making a decision? Or is there something separate, non-physical, which is like driving the system, but is not made of the physical bits and bobs?

• 16:07Daniel Whiteson?

  And so it's this experience, not just of having an experience, but having agency that's important. And so a few years ago, a philosopher named David Chalmers identified this as the hard problem of consciousness, to separate it from the easy problem of consciousness, which is like, you know, how does a brain work and all the mechanisms inside it and the optic nerve and all that stuff? He says, quote, "Even when we have explained the performance of all the cognitive and behavioral functions in the vicinity of experience, perceptual discrimination, categorization, internal access, verbal report, there may still remain a further unanswered question. Why is the performance of these functions accompanied by experience?" Essentially, why is it like anything to be you?

• 16:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  I love that the easy problem is a problem we like still haven't really figured out. And then the hard problem is a problem that we aren't actually sure we'll ever figure out. So they're both kind of hard problems, but one is just even harder.

• 17:07Daniel Whiteson?

  I know. And I saw yesterday on Twitter, somebody said, quote, "The hard problem of consciousness was invented by philosophers to sell more philosophy."

• 17:16Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, kind of true, kind of true. Anyway, of course, there's a bunch of different ideas about the hard problem of consciousness, of various schools of thought. So let's survey them quickly. One of them is called physicalism, which says, "There is no hard problem. Consciousness just emerges." And this is like Daniel Dennett's theory. He says that it's a bit of an illusion, like there is no moment when you're aware. Your brain is just like weaving together a story about what happened. And your sense of being aware is actually your memory of the immediate past. That there is no like moment of awareness. There's just, you're remembering something you didn't actually experience, and you think of that as experience.

• 18:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  Does that suggest that you don't actually have consciousness? You just have like a thing happening in your brain?

• 18:07Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, exactly. And it's weird to read a book about how you're not actually reading a book, you know? Or like, who is the you in this version who's not experiencing consciousness, but is having it explained to them how they're not conscious? It's very confusing.

• 18:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  It's hard to think about these problems and disconnect, like not wanting an answer to be the answer from how you feel about these things. Like, my first thought is, well, I don't want it to be that. But of course, that doesn't make it wrong. But anyway, I haven't, maybe I should read Consciousness Explained by Dennett.

• 18:40Daniel Whiteson?

  Critics of that book like to call it Consciousness Explained Away.

• 18:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right. What other theories do we have?

• 18:49Daniel Whiteson?

  Another one is called emergentism, and that says that consciousness emerges, but it rejects the sort of reductionist approach that says, you know, everything has to be explained in terms of the microscopic, that you need to like, understand how this comes out of the little bits and bobs, says it emerges on its own, that it's not reducible to some lower level description. This is what philosophers call strong emergence, says that not everything comes out of the smallest bits, that there can be fundamental laws at different scales. So like, it's not that F equals M A is some average of all the quantum processes. There's a new set of laws at the classical level than there are at the quantum mechanical level, and maybe there's a new set of laws that deal with how complicated neurons

• 19:34Daniel Whiteson?

  interact with each other, and consciousness emerges from that, not from the smallest bits, right? Can't be reduced to that. It's something new that comes out at this scale. It's a very weird kind of idea for those of us who are physicists who like to think of the universe as determined by what's happening on the microscopic level.

• 19:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, but it's still not saying that like, it's spiritual or magical in any sense. It's just there's physics.

• 20:02Daniel Whiteson?

  It's physical still.

• 20:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, physics happening at the quantum level and physics happening at the classical level, and something about what's happening at both of those levels is giving you consciousness.

• 20:10Daniel Whiteson?

  That's right. It's happening at its own level, and it's not just bubbling up from below, it's its own thing, but it's still physical.

• 20:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 20:17Daniel Whiteson?

  Then you get to dualism, and that says, yeah, it's not physical at all. There are two kinds of things in the universe. There's physical stuff, which can't think and have an experience, and then there's non-physical stuff. Consciousness is non-material. It's non-physical. And, you know, this isn't talking about a soul necessarily, but this is like Descartes, you know, the spirit and the body, these things are separate, and...

• 20:42Daniel Whiteson?

  You know, it just says that it doesn't have to follow the same rules. And that's why you can't explain it using physical theories because it's not a physical thing.

• 20:48Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, does this make pronouncements upon like, do octopus have consciousness? Or can you ask questions like that under this theory?

• 20:59Daniel Whiteson?

  You can ask questions like that. And under variants of this theory, octopi do have consciousness because they can have this non-physical stuff to them, which attributes them consciousness. So, yeah.

• 21:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, cool. All right, what else do we have?

• 21:12Daniel Whiteson?

  And then my favorite kind of crazy theory is called panpsychism. And this says, everything is conscious.

• 21:18Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 21:18Daniel Whiteson?

  Electrons have a little bit of consciousness and two electrons have a little bit more and 10 to the 29 electrons have quite a bit. And all the stuff that makes you up together makes your complicated consciousness. So the whole universe is aware. And this is kind of cool because it doesn't draw a dotted line between us and the universe. It says, you know, we are the part of the universe that is maybe most aware because we have these complicated things going on inside of us. These arrangements of the stuff we're made out of makes us more aware, but we're all aware. And that's kind of cool, I guess, but it's also pretty out there to say that electrons have a first person experience, that there's something it's like to be an electron.

• 21:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  So it's not just how much mass or how many particles you are made of.

• 22:03Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 22:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  It's also about the arrangement of those particles. And somehow humans are the best arrangement of particles for consciousness. Is that right?

• 22:11Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, exactly. So then Penrose comes in and Penrose is deeply influenced by Gödel's theorem. Gödel is a mathematician about 100 years ago, and he was around when David Hilbert was trying to find the axioms of mathematics, like what are the fundamental underlying rules of all of mathematics from which you can derive any bit of math? Which was a cool program, but then Gödel showed that it's actually impossible. Gödel's famous theorem, the incompleteness theorem, says that there's no consistent set of axioms that are capable of proving all true things about arithmetic, for example.

• 22:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  What a downer this guy is.

• 22:48Daniel Whiteson?

  I know. It's kind of mind boggling, but it means that you can have like a system of math with a consistent set of axioms, but there are things that are true that you can't prove.

• 22:59Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 22:59Daniel Whiteson?

  Right? Facts that are true, that there's just no algorithmic way to show that they are true. So there's like no procedure you can find.

• 23:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  But you can be sure that they're true?

• 23:09Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, you can't prove it, but they exist.

• 23:11Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, got it.

• 23:12Daniel Whiteson?

  One example of this is the halting problem. So like, can you, given an arbitrary computer with a program and an input, can you tell whether that program will run forever, like spinning beach ball of death, or it will ever stop? Because computers can get stuck in loops, right? And so it turns out this is a noncomputable problem. Like, not only can we not solve it, it's not solvable in principle. Okay, so Penrose said, that's pretty cool. Gödel is showing that there are things that we can't understand, but we can understand Gödel's theorem.

• 23:49Kelly Weinersmith?

  Hmm, okay.

• 23:51Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, so we can understand this theorem about how some things can't be proven. That means that our understanding is noncomputable, right? Some things are noncomputable, like the halting problem. But our understanding of the halting problem means that our understanding, the process we use to understand things, can handle noncomputability because we can understand noncomputability. This is sort of meta. Therefore, consciousness itself is noncomputable, non-simulatable.

• 24:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  But is, so isn't, wouldn't our understanding of Gödel's theorem be computable because we understand his theorem?

• 24:30Daniel Whiteson?

  We understand his theorem, but it's a theorem about noncomputability, right? And so you're right, and like scholars on Gödel are like deeply unimpressed with this leap of logic.

• 24:41Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 24:43Daniel Whiteson?

  So you're right to be skeptical because in principle, Gödel's theorem itself can be proven, right? And it exists in a larger set of axioms. And so understanding it doesn't mean that our brains have to be noncomputable in some way. But this is Penrose's argument. And he says, therefore, our minds are rooted in noncomputable physical law. Okay, that there's some part of physical law that's noncomputable and our minds are using that noncomputable element of it to work because we can understand noncomputability, therefore, our minds must be noncomputable. And I agree with you that that step is suspect, but that's his argument. So now he's thinking about consciousness and he's looking for something

• 25:26Daniel Whiteson?

  in the universe which is noncomputable, which is physical, which he can then use to establish as a basis for consciousness.

• 25:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, so pretend you were explaining this to someone and you were gonna skip Gödel's theorem and you were just gonna say, here is a piece of information you need to know. How would you explain that? Like, I think I'm getting tripped up on the noncomputable thing. Just like, give me a sentence that bottom lines, Penrose believes that our brains are...

• 25:54Daniel Whiteson?

  Penrose believes that our brains operate on some principles which can't be computed, that there's no algorithm to go from what you're feeling and thinking now to what you're feeling and thinking in a second.

• 26:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 26:06Daniel Whiteson?

  That there's no computer program you could write to predict it because it relies on some physical process which is noncomputable.

• 26:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay. Does that relate to any of the theories that we were just talking about? No.

• 26:16Daniel Whiteson?

  No. It's very different from any of these theories. It's its own personal theory of consciousness, but it does connect to his theories of the foundation of quantum mechanics, which we'll talk about after the break.

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• 29:10Speaker 17

  Tell your doctor about lightheadedness, weakness, fever, pain, tenderness, redness, or swelling in the perineum. You may have increased risk for lower limb loss. Call your doctor. Doctor right away if you have new pain or tenderness, sores, ulcers, or infection in your legs or feet. To learn more about Jardiance 10 or 25 milligram tablets, ask your doctor, visit jardiance.com, or call 1-888-968-6648.

• 29:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, so Penrose has decided that our brain is not like a computer.

• 29:51Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 29:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  And now we are talking about the next step of this complicated process. Daniel, where are we going next?

• 30:00Daniel Whiteson?

  So Penrose says our brains are not like a computer. Let's look out in the universe to find some physical thing which seems like not a computer. And maybe we can use that as the basis of our theory of consciousness. All right, so his target here is quantum mechanics. Because quantum mechanics is very weird. And computers are like deterministic, right? They operate under basic rules of algebra and logic. And so you can always predict what they're going to do. Whereas quantum mechanics is fuzzier and weirder. We don't quite understand it and how one thing gets chosen. And so it sounds like maybe a promising area to find some non-computable physical law that you could use as your basis of consciousness.

• 30:42Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, so let's remind ourselves, what is the other really hard philosophical problem out there right now? Not just consciousness, put that in a box. Let's talk about the measurement problem in quantum mechanics. The other major thing that everybody else struggles with. And this is a question of how the universe decides what we see when we measure a quantum object. Because remember, the cool thing about quantum objects is they can be in a superposition. You have an electron, you put it through a machine, it can either go left or right. Before you measure it, it's in a superposition of left and right. It's not that it's gone left and you don't know it, or that it's gone right and you don't know it, or even that it's somehow done both, right? You see that in popular science all the time.

• 31:27Daniel Whiteson?

  Instead, it's in a superposition of both of those states. And that's something that quantum objects can do. They can have a superposition, they cannot be settled into one particular outcome. But then when we measure something, we put a detector to say, did it go left or did it go right? Then the universe picks one. The superposition collapses into either left or either right. Okay. And how this happens and why it happens is the question of quantum measurement. Because this seems to happen when we measure a quantum object with a classical detector. Like I have a big detector in my lab and it's made of big physical things and you know, I'm moving around, it's the size and scale of me. It's not the kind of thing that can be in superposition. I can't be in a superposition, you can't be in a superposition.

• 32:12Daniel Whiteson?

  It makes a definitive measurement, a left or a right. It doesn't come back and say lefty and righty at the same time. It measures left or right. And when a classical object like that measures a quantum object, the quantum object collapses into either left or right. Superposition is gone. The super weird bit is that that doesn't happen if we interact our quantum object with another quantum object. Like say I shoot in another electron and I can entangle them together. And now they can be like, one is left and one is right. And or one is right and one is left. They can maintain their superpositions even though they interact. But when they interact with the classical detector, boom, collapse happens. And that's super weird because what's the classical detector made out of? Well, quantum objects.

• 32:57Daniel Whiteson?

  So why does interacting with a classical detector have to collapse the superposition? When you interact with the first quantum object at the very tip of the detector, that should just be like interacting with another quantum object. You should stay in a superposition. And then in the next particle, and then the next particle. At what point does your classical object, which is made of quantum objects, no longer capable of being in a superposition? Why does that happen? That's the measurement problem in quantum mechanics. How and when and why you go from superposition to collapse?

• 33:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  That was a really good explanation. I don't think you've given that particular explanation on the show before. And excellent. So what, what's the best answer we have for that, Daniel?

• 33:36Daniel Whiteson?

  We have a bunch of weird answers. The most common answer is nonsensical. This is the Copenhagen theory. And it says, look, there's two kinds of things in the universe. There's quantum stuff, which can mean superposition. And there's classical stuff, which cannot be in superposition. And then you ask, well, what's the difference between classical and quantum stuff? And they say, I don't know. You say, well, where's the line between quantum and classical stuff? And they say undefined. So it's not really an answer, right? It just says, let's just say that there is classical stuff and there is quantum stuff. So it's one of these like answers only by definition that doesn't really satisfy anybody.

• 34:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  It's just like throwing their hands up in the air and being like, oh, I don't know. I quit.

• 34:15Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah. Yeah. And it's weird because it's on one hand, the most common explanation and the one you see in like quantum textbooks and popular science. But in philosophy of physics, people like it's incoherent. It's not even a theory. Like it doesn't even explain it. It doesn't even try. But, you know, it allows you to move forward and like calculate stuff without worrying about it. So if you don't really care about the answer, you can just sort of accept that and move on.

• 34:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  It does sound impressive. The Copenhagen interpretation does, does sound, it sounds impressive.

• 34:46Daniel Whiteson?

  Wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen.

• 34:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes. But, but then the good news is now that you've listened to this podcast, the next time someone says the Copenhagen interpretation, you can go, ah, ah, the Copenhagen interpretation. And now you get to sound snotty.

• 35:00Daniel Whiteson?

  So another famous interpretation is the many worlds interpretation. And this says, there is no collapse. What happens is that the universe branches. There's a version where the universe goes left and a version where the universe goes right. We happen to be in one of them and not the other one, but there is no real collapse. And this is a beautiful theory because collapse is weird. Like collapse doesn't exist in the equations of quantum mechanics. The equations suggest everything just keeps evolving and maintaining the wave function. And so this is in some sense, the most natural interpretation of quantum mechanics. Sean Carroll is a big advocate for this and talks about it very eloquently. He was on our podcast to talk about that. It was a lot of fun. And essentially in that scenario, you become part of the system.

• 35:45Daniel Whiteson?

  Like you make a measurement. Now you are in one branch of the wave function. The superposition still exists. The electron can still be left or right, but you are in the right branch, which is why you're measuring right. And there's another version of you in the left branch and that version of you is measuring the left. This is often misunderstood as like, the whole universe is duplicated. Like we make a copy and create more electrons. But instead just think of it as like the superposition of possibilities just keeps flowing, man. Right? And now you're part of the system instead of looking at it from the outside.

• 36:18Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right. So, but how does that answer the question about like, you're this big classical object that's making the measurements? And as you're moving from one electron to another in the classical object, how do you go from being an electron to being a classical object?

• 36:34Daniel Whiteson?

  Like There are no classical objects. Everything is quantum. And every time you interact, you become entangled with the system.

• 36:41Kelly Weinersmith?

  That is a lot for my brain to handle.

• 36:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 36:47Daniel Whiteson?

  Another really fun idea is called Bohmian mechanics. And this says, forget all this random stuff. Quantum mechanics is not actually random. It's deterministic. It's controlled by some global pilot wave. And this does an end run around Bell's experiments, which if you remember, prove that there's no local hidden variables controlling quantum mechanics. That truly is random by saying, oh, there's no local hidden variables. There can be global hidden variables. And that's the pilot wave. It's this like weird thing that sits on top of the universe and decides where particles go. And so there's no randomness at all. It's just all determined by this pilot wave that we can't see or measure that's deciding. And it makes it look like it's random, but it really isn't.

• 37:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  Is there any way to test this?

• 37:32Daniel Whiteson?

  There is no way to test these two theories. They make exactly the same predictions for all experiments. So they're just interpretations. They're just ways of saying what's happening behind the scenes invisibly. And because it's the invisible part we're talking about, and that's the only place they differ. We can't come up with experiments to differentiate between these two.

• 37:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 37:51Daniel Whiteson?

  But the crucial thing for our conversation about Penrose is that in the Copenhagen interpretation, where you have this like weird moment where we go from superposition to collapse, that collapse is what interested Penrose, right? Because it sounds on the surface of it like, hmm, maybe this is something that can help us establish consciousness. Because there's something weird that's happening here. But the hurdle immediately is that collapse in the Copenhagen theory is random. Okay. But it's computable in the sense that you can't tell exactly what's going to happen, but you can predict the probabilities.

• 38:27Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 38:27Daniel Whiteson?

  And so Penrose is looking for something that's not random and not computable. So he can't use this Copenhagen Collapse theory. So he comes up with his own theory of the measurement problem, his own theory of collapse. It's called objective reduction. He comes up with a theory that has a collapse of the wave function, but the collapse is not random, but it is noncomputable. So he's come up with his own theory, not Copenhagen, not many worlds, not Bohmian, his own explanation for collapse that provides a not random, noncomputable mechanism for the collapse, which is what he's going to need later for his theory of consciousness.

• 39:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  Does this do a better job of explaining quantum mechanics? Or is this just like motivated by a desire to explain consciousness? And so he's creating a whole new world?

• 39:20Daniel Whiteson?

  It sort of does a better job in that it's more ambitious. Not only is he going to try to solve the measurement problem, a huge outstanding puzzle in philosophy, in order to set him up to solve the question of consciousness, another huge outstanding puzzle in philosophy, he's going to do it by trying to simultaneously solve the quantum gravity puzzle.

• 39:41Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wow.

• 39:42Daniel Whiteson?

  Which physicists have been banging their head against the wall for for 100 years, right? He's like, oh, maybe I can go for, you know, a home run here. Let's go for the trifecta.

• 39:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  A hat trick.

• 39:52Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes, exactly.

• 39:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  I think that's you get three things in a row with the hat trick. That's what we want.

• 39:57Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, well, he's going to go for four in a minute.

• 39:59Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, okay. Let's take a break and we'll let Penrose do his hat trick. And then he can do his hat trick plus one, because I don't know enough about sports to know what happens when you get four points.

• 40:19Speaker 18

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• 40:47Speaker 08

  Hey, it's Niall Rogers, host of Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series. I'm driving across the country, meeting some of today's most fascinating artists. We're exploring the stories before the moment that changed everything. This week, I'm joined by Miguel.

• 41:05Speaker 19

  My small experience with the discrepancy in the business of music made me angry in the best way, and I wanted to, I wanted to finish. So I started really like leaning into my therapy, trying to get down to like what matters now. Somewhere, Miguelito felt like he didn't have a place to say how he felt, and music was the place that I went to, to say how I felt.

• 41:28Speaker 08

  Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeartRadio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 41:37Speaker 16

  I have type 2 diabetes, but I manage it well. It's a little pill with a big story to tell. I take ones daily, Jardiance, at each day's start.

• 41:50Speaker 17

  And for adults with type 2 diabetes and known heart disease, Jardiance can lower the risk of cardiovascular death, too. Prescription Jardiance, empecagliflozin, 10 or 25-milligram tablets, are used to lower blood sugar along with diet and exercise in adults with type 2 diabetes. Jardiance is not for use to lower blood sugar in people with type 1 diabetes, and not for people with type 2 diabetes who have severe kidney disease. Serious side effects include increased ketones in blood or urine, and infection in the area between and around the anus and genitals called the perineum. Both may be fatal. Severe allergic reactions, dehydration, urinary tract or genital yeast infections in men and women, and low blood sugar. Stop taking and tell your doctor right away if you have nausea, vomiting, stomach pain, tiredness, rash, swelling, trouble breathing, or swallowing.

• 42:32Speaker 17

  Tell your doctor about lightheadedness, weakness, fever, pain, tenderness, redness, or swelling in the perineum. You may have increased risk for lower limb loss. Call your doctor right away if you have new pain or tenderness, sores, ulcers, or infection in your legs or feet. To learn more about Jardiance's 10 or 25-milligram tablets, ask your doctor, visit jardiance.com, or call 1-888-968-6648.

• 43:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  And we're back. And so let's go ahead and talk about how Penrose solves the quantum mechanics problem in a non-computable way. Did I say the science words in the right order there?

• 43:21Daniel Whiteson?

  You totally did. Yes, you science did correctly. So we have this problem in physics, which is that we have two wonderful theories. We have quantum mechanics, which explains particles and randomness and has been tested like 10 decimal places and is totally correct. And it's amazing and beautiful. And we also have gravity and we have a theory of general relativity, which tells us a story about space and time. And it's been tested to 10 decimal places and is totally correct. And that's wonderful, except that the two theories are fundamentally at odds with each other. And we do not know how to bring them together. And most of the time, that's not a problem, because things are either gravitational, like the way the earth moves around the sun,

• 44:04Daniel Whiteson?

  or the way black holes form, or they're quantum mechanical, like the way electrons interact in a system, or what happens when you smash protons at the Large Hadron Collider. You can ignore one, and you can choose one and ignore the other. But there are some times in the universe when both are at play, like what's at the heart of a black hole, or what was it like in the early universe? In those regimes, we don't know how to operate. We can't make predictions, for example, before the earliest moment in the universe, because we don't have a theory of quantum gravity. And we can't tell you what's inside a black hole, because we don't know how to do gravity for tiny particles.

• 44:39Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 44:40Daniel Whiteson?

  So major stumbling block for particle physics and for cosmology. And one of the issues is that when you try to do gravity for particles, you get stuck. And you get stuck like this. Well, if particles can have probabilities of being in different locations, like is the electron left or is the electron right, then that location determines where space is curved, right? And that means that like, space can have different curvatures. So if the electron could be left and could be right, that means that space could be bent over here, or it could be bent over there. And so now you have like this weird thing where the curvature of space isn't known because you don't know where the masses are. The masses only have a probability of being

• 45:22Daniel Whiteson?

  in certain places. So either you have like the probability of different curvatures, or space has probabilities built into it. And so nobody knows how to tackle that problem.

• 45:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  I'm so glad biology has everything figured out.

• 45:35Daniel Whiteson?

  So Penrose says, all right, well, what if each of those superpositions, those different possible arrangements of mass which cause their own different spacetime curvatures, what if those different possibilities, that's what causes the collapse? So think of like one arrangement of particles having one set of curvature and another possible arrangement of the same state, right? Quantum mechanical superposition having a different arrangement. And if those two arrangements of spacetime which cause different curvatures get different enough, then something becomes unstable in the universe and collapses. Okay, so when the gravitational difference between two quantum branches exceeds

• 46:16Daniel Whiteson?

  some threshold, then the wave function collapses from superposition into one option.

• 46:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  So now instead of just talking about electrons, we're talking about groups of particles.

• 46:28Daniel Whiteson?

  It could also just be one electron, because in principle electron has mass and it should curve spacetime.

• 46:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 46:34Daniel Whiteson?

  And the question is, does it curve spacetime over here or over there?

• 46:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 46:38Daniel Whiteson?

  And Penrose is saying, if the difference between those two things gets big enough, like you have enough particles in there, then it collapses. And there's a threshold there. And it doesn't rely on observation or on interaction, but the bigger the tension between the two gravitational possibilities, and whenever it gets above some threshold, it collapses. And so this is his theory called objective reduction. So we're not yet at consciousness. This is just Penrose's theory of why things collapse. And along the way, he's going to try to reconcile quantum mechanics and gravity. So he's saying that it's this tension between the different gravitational results of two elements of the superposition that causes them to collapse down to one.

• 47:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  So then what does Penrose's idea do with the fact that we know that when you observe something, you get a collapse?

• 47:27Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah. So Penrose is saying, well, when you observe with a quantum object, you're adding a bunch of stuff to the system that goes above the threshold because now you have like enough gravity in there to get above the threshold. Your big classical detector, which has, you know, a big piece of material on it, has so much gravity in it that it can't be in two states at once without those two things collapsing. So that's why classical things can't be in a superposition because they exceed this threshold, which is very, very small. It's like Planck scale threshold. And so only really tiny stuff can be in a superposition because bigger stuff exceeds this threshold. And this is a cool idea. Nobody's proven it. Nobody knows whether this is true. We can't test it at all. And like many theories

• 48:10Daniel Whiteson?

  in quantum gravity, we can't test them because we can't probe this stuff. We can't go inside a black hole. We can't visit the early universe. For Penrose, the cool thing about this is now the collapse is not random, but it's also not algorithmic. Okay, it's noncomputable. It's determined by something he calls, you know, the platonic truth of the universe. And so, you know, why it goes into left or right, why it collapses into one or the other is not random, but it's noncomputable.

• 48:39Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 48:40Daniel Whiteson?

  And so he's tried to solve this measurement problem and along the way come up with a proposal for quantum gravity unification. And what he ended up with is a explanation for quantum mechanics and the measurement problem, which says that the collapse is not random, but also noncomputable. And that's what he thinks consciousness is, right? And so he thinks that maybe this kind of experience, having these microstates collapse, using his objective reduction theory, is a fundamental building block of consciousness. Because remember, he was looking for something in the physical universe, which was not random, but also noncomputable. And, you know, that's not enough. It's not like saying, hey, consciousness

• 49:24Daniel Whiteson?

  has these two characteristics, and this thing I just came up with also has those two characteristics. Therefore, they're the same thing. Like, not everything that's big and red is a firetruck, right? Having two things in common doesn't mean that they're identical. But it's sort of a hint in the right direction.

• 49:40Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, right, because that right now that would say that rocks have consciousness because they have these features, right?

• 49:47Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, exactly. And so now we come to the biological side of this. There was a guy, an anesthesiologist named Stuart Hammeroff. And he's been thinking about anesthetics and consciousness as anesthesiologists will do. And he read about Penrose's theory of objective reduction. And he went to chat with Penrose and he said, I have an idea for where this quantum stuff is happening. And so there's these things inside neurons that are protein scaffolds. They're called microtubules. And they're really tiny little things. They're like 50 micrometers long. They're really thin. They're like 25 nanometers thin. And, you know, they're involved in like maintaining the structure of the cell and they form a cytoskeleton.

• 50:31Daniel Whiteson?

  And so these things are inside your neurons and they're really, really small. And he thought maybe these things support quantum superpositions, like they can be in two different states. Like, you know, this twist or that twist. And because they're so small, they can be in a superposition of different states. And he has this idea that anesthetics work by binding two microtubules to turn off your consciousness. He thinks microtubules are quantum objects in that, you know, they can be in this superposition. And that their collapse is where the moment of consciousness comes from.

• 51:11Daniel Whiteson?

  That when these quantum tubules become unstable and they collapse in this non-random, non-computable way, that's the moment of consciousness. So Hammeroff and Penrose came together to make this theory called orchestrated objective reduction theory. So remember, Penrose came up with objective reduction, which explains how things collapse quantum mechanically. This orchestrated objective reduction theory says, okay, it's microtubules in your neurons that are collapsing. And the neural processes in those neurons orchestrate the buildup of these superpositions, which then become unstable and they collapse. And every time they collapse, that's a little bit of the conscious experience.

• 51:54Daniel Whiteson?

  And so this orchestration is like the physical basis for intentional control. It's not like, you know, you are outside the universe and you're determining it in some spiritual way, but they can like affect the way that the collapse happens and in that way, impact the decisions you're making. So Hammeroff, the anesthesiologist, helps by proposing like exactly where this quantum process might be happening in the brain, which is noncomputable and non-random in the way that Penrose wanted.

• 52:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right. So first, I think I'm constrained by the metaphor that I always use when I think about microtubules, which is I think of them as like the studs and joists of like your cells. You know, they, they give your, it the structure. So this idea that they're like in a superposition is foreign to me. So the idea is that they're like twisted and they untwist. Is that, that's true? Question mark?

• 52:52Daniel Whiteson?

  It's about the conformational states. I don't think it has to be twists necessarily.

• 52:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 52:58Daniel Whiteson?

  But these things are not firm, right? They can wiggle a little bit.

• 53:01Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 53:01Daniel Whiteson?

  And so, you know, they have a possibility to wiggle this way or wiggle that way or stretch this way or stretch that way. Here, we're definitely at the very edge of my biological knowledge.

• 53:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, yeah. I'm not a microtubule person, unfortunately. And so.

• 53:14Daniel Whiteson?

  And these are also not the things that give Jedis the force in Star Wars.

• 53:17Kelly Weinersmith?

  Right.

• 53:19Daniel Whiteson?

  Those are the midi-chlorians.

• 53:20Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, I wasn't seeing where you were going there. Thank you for walking me the rest of the way. Okay. So you get consciousness in like little drips and drops every time these superpositions collapse?

• 53:34Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 53:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 53:36Daniel Whiteson?

  That's the idea. And so, you know, we've tried to explain consciousness by saying it's the collapse of the states of these microtubules in your brain, which is noncomputable, yet not random, and happen when the superpositions get big enough that they go above this quantum gravity threshold that Penrose has, has postulated. That's the big idea. So these microtubules are basically in these quantum states and the collapse of those states. Is your experience. There's a lot of like big leaps here that is just sort of dot, dot, dotting over. Even if this is all true and microtubules are in quantum superpositions and that collapse is noncomputable and non-random, I don't see how that connects to consciousness.

• 54:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 54:21Daniel Whiteson?

  Like, we thought that link was kind of weak earlier, saying that like, we can understand the theory of noncomputability, therefore our thinking itself is noncomputable. That seems kind of weak. And even if you accept that, just because our thinking is noncomputable and there's something noncomputable happening inside our brains, doesn't mean, again, that it's the fire truck, right? There's no clear thing connecting one to the other. But, you know, Hameroff's argument is, these things are connected to consciousness because anesthetics bind to these things to turn off your consciousness. Right? So, there's our fourth element of the hat trick. We're also going to explain the mystery of anesthetics.

• 55:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  But when we did the episode on general anesthetics, and I was interviewing an anesthesiologist, she said that when you inject noble gases, which don't react to anything into people, you get a similar effect to knock people out. And they're probably not binding to the microtubules, right? And so we don't understand what's happening with anesthetics at that level, I thought.

• 55:26Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah. So we've tried to present the best case we can for this. Now it's time to, you know, poke at some of its weaknesses. We've hinted at a few of those already, and the point you made is a great one. But more broadly, people think that microtubules are anyway just too noisy to maintain any sort of coherent quantum superpositions. Like, they're big, you know, these things are not individual particles. They're micrometers long. And Max Tegmark's response to this theory is, quote, "The brain is about as quantum coherent as a cup of warm, wet oatmeal." Like, the idea that these things could maintain a superposition, which requires being isolated from the rest of the environment in order

• 56:08Daniel Whiteson?

  to maintain that superposition until the moment you want to collapse, right, seems hard to do because they're already big and connected with each other. And so to have them individually collapsing, they need to be isolated so they can maintain that superposition, and that seems pretty tough. The big concern here, though, is that this is a lot of speculation. And, you know, a lot of it could be right, but most of it can't really be tested. Like, we can't test the theory of quantum gravity. We can't test quantum mechanical interpretations. We can't test these questions about consciousness. It's also beyond our ability to probe. And so it's sort of like saying, hey, these four things that we can't really ever test. What if there's one coherent explanation? Yeah, man, pass the banana peels. That sounds cool, but what are we going to do with that, right?

• 56:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, that doesn't mean it's not a good exercise, you know, to think about and ponder and use to like generate new novel ideas and stuff, but yeah.

• 57:03Daniel Whiteson?

  So I did talk to my friend who's a neuroscientist. She does research on fruit flies and stuff like this. And I asked her, like, do you think neurons are random or deterministic? Like, if you feed a neuron the same input twice, are you going to get the same answer? Or does it depend on the quantum nature of the things a neuron is made out of? And she was like, neurons are totally deterministic. Like, there's noise reduction stuff that's happening in there. You tweak a neuron the same way twice, you're going to get the same answer. And, you know, she latches on to neurons in the lab and does this. So she knows a lot about neurons. So already, it seems hard to build consciousness out of neurons if those neurons already have the quantumness averaged out. The neurons are essentially already being classical.

• 57:48Daniel Whiteson?

  They're like the baseballs more than they're like electrons. I mean, I guess Penrose's argument is that this goes deeper than neurons. But I'm skeptical of that as well. But, you know, these are not hard criticisms because there isn't really anything you can concretely attack in this theory because there are no experiments that you can do. You can just argue about the ideas.

• 58:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, I think that we have all earned ourselves some self-care this evening. So get in a bubble bath with a bath bomb. Go have a bottle of whiskey, not a bottle of whiskey, I mean, a glass of whiskey. Not the whole bottle. Make good choices, friends. This was, uh, there was a lot going on in this episode, but we learned a lot and you got us through it, Daniel, in a really gentle way.

• 58:30Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, well, let's send this back to Scott and see if his bubble bath and his glass of whiskey have put him in a place where he goes ouch or mm, I get it now. Thank you very much for sending in your questions, Scott. Let's hear what Scott has to say.

• 58:45Speaker 04

  Hello, Daniel and Kelly. Thanks so much for responding to my question about Penrose and Hammeroff's orchestrated objective reduction theory of consciousness. Kelly well captured my experience when she said, "That was a lot for my brain," which is fairly typical when I listen to you guys. Not exactly ouch, but not totally I get it now either. But whether or not my consciousness arises from the collapse of quantum superpositions in the microtubules and the neurons in my brain, it does love being challenged and stretched and exploring new ideas, which I think is actually a form of self-care. I feel like I have at least some new understandings of theories of quantum superposition and theories

• 59:27Speaker 04

  of consciousness, as well as the challenge of testing those theories. I appreciate them putting forward this idea to expand our thinking around the hard question, and I also appreciate the skepticism that Daniel brings to the idea. So thanks again for answering my question, or at least trying your very best to do that. Malo.

• 59:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, Daniel's explanations today made me go, "Hmm, not ouch today." So thank you for that great explanation of a super interesting theory.

• 59:56Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, and thank you very much, everybody, for being curious about the universe and for wanting to understand these ideas on the cutting edge. Please, please, share your curiosity with us. Send us your questions and lend us your ears.

• 1:00:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  And if you're enjoying the show, feel free to leave us a review on your favorite podcasting app.

• 1:00:20Kelly Weinersmith?

  Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by iHeartRadio. We would love to hear from you.

• 1:00:26Daniel Whiteson?

  We really would. We want to know what questions you have about this extraordinary universe.

• 1:00:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  We want to know your thoughts on recent shows, suggestions for future shows. If you contact us, we will get back to you.

• 1:00:38Daniel Whiteson?

  We really mean it. We answer every message. Email us at [email protected].

• 1:00:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  Or you can find us on social media. We have accounts on X, Instagram, Blue Sky, and on all of those platforms, you can find us at D and K Universe.

• 1:00:54Daniel Whiteson?

  Don't be shy. Write to us.

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