Survival of the Soul
Near-death experiences occur when
the soul leaves the nervous system and enters the universe, claim two quantum
physics experts
- Ground-breaking
theory holds that quantum substances form the soul
- They are part of the
fundamental structure of the universe
Life after death: Dr Stuart Hameroff, Professor Emeritus at the
University of Arizona, advanced the theory on a television documentary
A near-death experience
happens when quantum substances which form the soul leave the nervous system and enter the universe
at large, according to a remarkable theory proposed by two eminent scientists.
According to this idea,
consciousness is a program for a quantum computer in the brain which can
persist in the universe even after death, explaining the perceptions of those
who have near-death experiences.
Dr Stuart Hameroff,
Professor Emeritus at the Departments of Anesthesiology and Psychology and the
Director of the Centre of Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona,
has advanced the quasi-religious theory.
It is based on a quantum
theory of consciousness he and British physicist Sir Roger Penrose have
developed which holds that the essence of our soul is contained inside
structures called microtubules within brain cells.
They have argued that our
experience of consciousness is the result of quantum gravity effects in these
microtubules, a theory which they dubbed orchestrated objective reduction
(Orch-OR).
Thus it is held that our
souls are more than the interaction of neurons in the brain. They are in fact
constructed from the very fabric of the universe - and may have existed since
the beginning of time.
The
concept is similar to the Buddhist and Hindu belief that consciousness is an
integral part of the universe - and indeed that it is really all there may be,
a position similar to Western philosophical idealism.
With these beliefs, Dr
Hameroff holds that in a near-death experience the microtubules lose their
quantum state, but the information within them is not destroyed. Instead it
merely leaves the body and returns to the cosmos.
Shocked back to life: The theory holds that when patients have a near
death experience their quantum soul is released from the body and re-enters the
cosmos, before returning when they are revived
Dr Hameroff told the
Science Channel's Through the Wormhole documentary: 'Let's say the heart stops
beating, the blood stops flowing, the microtubules lose their quantum state.
'The quantum information
within the microtubules is not destroyed, it can't be destroyed, it just
distributes and dissipates to the universe at large.
'If the patient is
resuscitated, revived, this quantum information can go back into the
microtubules and the patient says "I had a near death experience".'
He adds: 'If they're not
revived, and the patient dies, it's possible that this quantum information can
exist outside the body, perhaps indefinitely, as a soul.'
Evidence: Dr Hameroff believes new findings about the role quantum
physics plays in biological processes, such as the navigation of birds, will
one day prove his theory
The Orch-OR theory has
come in for heavy criticism by more empirically minded thinkers and remains
controversial among the scientific community.
MIT physicist Max Tegmark
is just one of the many scientists to have challenged it, in a 2000 paper that
is widely cited by opponents, the Huffington Post reports.
Nevertheless, Dr Hameroff
believes that research in to quantum physics is beginning to validate Orch-Or,
with quantum effects recently being shown to support many important biological
processes, such as smell, bird navigation and photosynthesis.
From the Daily Mail @ http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2225190/Can-quantum-physics-explain-bizarre-experiences-patients-brought-brink-death.html
What is Consciousness?
A Conversation with Stuart
Hameroff
Ed. Note: In the following dialogue, excerpted and edited
from the Institute of Noetic Sciences’ teleseminar series “Essentials
of Noetic Science,” IONS President Marilyn Mandala Schlitz talks with
Stuart Hameroff, Professor Emeritus, Departments of Anesthesiology and Psychology,
and Director for the Center
for Consciousness Studies, both at the University of Arizona. The Center
sponsors the annual Toward a Science of Consciousness conference, the largest
and longest-running event of its kind in the world, which emphasizes rigorous
and interdisciplinary approaches to the study of conscious awareness.
Hameroff’s theories of the mechanisms of consciousness are starting to spark
interest among both scientists and mystics.
Schlitz: By way of background, tell us how you came to have
this deep and abiding fascination with consciousness?
Hameroff: I first got interested when I took a course in
college on philosophy of mind. In medical school too, I was always intrigued by
the brain-mind problem, how the brain produces conscious experience. I was
drawn to neurology, psychiatry, and neurosurgery of the brain. I eventually
wound up in anesthesiology—because I liked the lifestyle much better and because
the fellow who would be my future chairman told me at the time that if I want
to understand consciousness, I should figure out how anesthesia works because
“we don’t know.” (Actually, we still don’t know, although I have some ideas
about it.) The other reason was my almost-obsession with microtubules, the
structures inside cells that form, do mitosis, pull the chromosomes apart, form
the structure of cells, and regulate synapses. They seem to me to be like
little computers. My future boss told me that an anesthetic depolymerizes these
structures. So those were several reasons for me to choose anesthesiology to
continue my interest in studying how the brain produces consciousness.
Schlitz: So what is consciousness? How do you answer that?
Hameroff: For me, it’s awareness.
Sometimes we get caught up in the terms, and people use them to mean different
things—group consciousness, self-consciousness. But I define consciousness as
any awareness whatsoever, and that is the hard problem that needs to be explained.
It’s still a mystery.
Schlitz: So how do you address the question of those places where
we have experience but are not aware of it? For example, does inattentional
blindness (not seeing something in plain sight) fit your definition?
Hameroff: I would say that is not consciousness. That is
cognition; it is subconscious information. Our brains drive all kinds of
behaviors and processes that are not conscious. I’ll give you one example. In
anesthesiology, when surgeons perform surgery on the spine, we worry that they
might do something to the spinal cord. So we monitor brain potentials.
Electrophysiologists put electrodes on the brain, on the scalp, and stimulate
the legs, the hands, or the eyes to get signals from the brain they can monitor
to know whether the spinal cord is intact. And yet, the patients are completely
unconscious. That’s an example of the brain doing something, processing
information, without consciousness.
We do all kinds of things
by autopilot, by habit. You know, when I’m driving to work, I frequently
daydream about various things: what my case will be that day, what happened the
previous night, a ball game, this or that. So, I’m sort of conscious. I’m not
totally conscious of the road as long as everything is going smoothly, but if something
happens, whether a car swerves or a horn honks or a light changes, then my
consciousness immediately returns to driving. I’m actually driving on autopilot
by and large, and I think most people have a similar experience. So behavior
and cognition may or may not be conscious. I like the metaphor of an airplane
pilot who can press a button to put the plane on autopilot and then go to the
bathroom or take a nap or mess with the stewardess while the plane flies
perfectly well as long as everything is routine. If something happens, the
pilot immediately takes control. I think our brains work the same way.
Consciousness can kind of wander around our brain, into memory, into fantasy,
into various things, while our nonconscious brain continues driving or walking
or even carrying on a conversation.
Schlitz: That brings up the question of the brain and
consciousness. Are they equal or similar? How do you distinguish, or not,
consciousness from the brain?
Hameroff: Well, the brain is the organ that manifests consciousness,
at least our consciousness, and, you know, it depends on who you ask. If you
ask most scientists, neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers, they
would share the conventional wisdom that the brain is a computer of a hundred
billion neurons acting like switches or bits in a silicon computer—without much
significant difference—and that because of the setup, when it reaches a
critical level of computation or complexity or some kind of magic threshold,
consciousness emerges.
I don’t think that is the
case at all. I think consciousness is actually fundamental and intrinsic to the
universe, that it’s built into the universe. We need our brain to build this
complex picture of consciousness—conscious images, conscious thought, and so
forth—but the raw precursors
of consciousness, the components of consciousness, are what philosophers call qualia. I think they are inherent in
the universe, much like mass, spin, and charge are fundamental, irreducible
components. Quantum processes in the brain connect our brain to these
fundamental processes intrinsic to the universe.
Schlitz: That brings up the criticism that the brain can’t be a
quantum processor because it’s too wet or too warm or whatever the criticism
happens to be. What I’m hearing you say is that, in your view, the brain can be
a signaling processor for a kind of quantum field. How does that happen then?
How do you bring microtubules into this idea of the brain as a quantum
processor?
Hameroff: First of all, what you said is exactly right. Most
people do criticize the view that Roger Penrose and I came out with in
1995—that quantum computing and these microtubules inside brain neurons connect
us to the fundamental level of the universe. They say, “Everybody knows that the brain is too warm, wet, and
noisy to be a quantum computer.” They say this because of the problem
technologists, engineers, and physicists face when trying to build quantum
computers in a laboratory that will utilize these delicate quantum states. I
should say a little bit about what that means: quantum superposition, where
something can be in two states or places at the same time. When they try to do
this with ions, individual atoms, or small particles, they run into the problem
that any thermal vibration, any heat, will disrupt and destroy the quantum
superposition and cause decoherence. And so to build a quantum computer in the
laboratory and avoid the heat and the vibrations caused by the heat, they build
them at absolute zero temperature.
But biology has had
billions of years to evolve mechanisms to avoid decoherence, and, more
importantly, it’s probable that biology has developed mechanisms to use the
heat to drive coherence like a laser. A laser is a quantum device; it uses heat
not to destroy quantum coherence but to pump it. And so we—and a lot of
people—think that biology uses heat and ambient energy to drive quantum coherence, not destroy
it.
Recent evidence in the
last five or six years has come down pretty strongly on our side. For example,
it’s been discovered that photosynthesis—the operation in all plants that give
rise to our food, to everything we eat—utilizes quantum coherence. The photons
from the sun are collected in one part of the cell and conveyed to another part
of the cell to be made into chemical energy. This conductance of energy from
point A to point B utilizes quantum coherence in ambient temperatures. If this
happens in something as fundamental as photosynthesis, then it’s likely to be
found throughout biology. And more importantly to our case, a fellow in Japan
named Anirban Bandyopadhyay—it’s a hard name to say, but I think he’ll be quite
famous within a few years—recently found that when vibrated at the right
frequency, microtubules become quantum devices. And when that work comes
out—Bandyopadhyay is presently writing it— it’s going to blow this field wide
open.
Schlitz: So, the idea is that there is this broader quantum field,
and the microtubules in our brains, in a sense, insulate the quantum process in
the brain. How does that connect to a broader sense of consciousness as a
field? How do you make the link there?
Hameroff: This is the kind of thing I’ve been talking about with
Deepak Chopra. We’ve had a series of interviews online, radio interviews on his
Sirius show, and blogs on the Huffington Post. He takes the Vedic perspective
that consciousness is everywhere—consciousness is everything, and everything is
consciousness. I wouldn’t go that far. I would say that protoconsciousness is
everywhere—that there’s a field, if you will, or the very fine structure of the
universe, which is everywhere and which is holographic, repeating at different
scales, nonlocally. Consciousness is a fundamental property built into that.
It’s not everything because there’s also mass, spin, or charge, which may not
be consciousness. Still, intrinsic to the universe, everywhere you go, are the
raw precursors of consciousness.
So you could call that a
quantum field, or you could call it quantum gravity or space-time
geometry—they’re all different descriptions of the same field or phenomenon or
entity, which is everywhere. Wherever you go, there it is; that’s where the raw
precursors of consciousness exist. I think the quantum processes in the
microtubules access and connect our brains to this quantum field or quantum
gravity at the fundamental level, and that’s what gives rise to experience and
awareness. So I’m very sympathetic to the view that consciousness is in the
quantum field, everywhere we go. But some fine-tuning of the idea is needed to
make it compatible with modern physics.
Schlitz: We’ve been doing this research at the Institute of Noetic
Sciences—both Edgar Mitchell’s work on quantum holography, which sounds very
compatible with what you’re describing, and Dean Radin’s work, exploring the
idea that if you wire somebody for their physiological response and then expose
them to emotionally evocative pictures, you can actually see people respond to
the emotional targets prior
to seeing them. There’s a kind of presentiment that their body, their
physiology, registers—in your definition it would be at the level below the
threshold of awareness or consciousness. Somehow, people are perceiving
information that their body knows, and it’s a two-second window. This study and
this observation have now been replicated in various laboratories. In
Amsterdam, Dick Bierman has been doing work. Daryl Bem . . .
Hameroff: . . . yes, Daryl Bem just wrote that meta-analysis.
Schlitz: That’s right. There’s something really interesting that’s
happening in this field. So how do you bridge those kinds of empirical data
that suggest, whether it’s consciousness or awareness, that our experience of
the world may be able to anticipate our sensory encounter with that world? How
does that then fit with your own theoretical framework?
Hameroff: It fits very well, actually. And in fact it goes
back to Libet’s experiments in the late 1970s on patients having neurosurgery
while awake under local anesthesia. He could access their brains and stimulate
different parts of their bodies and get a verbal report, a subjective report,
of their conscious experience. To make a long story short, he found that the
brain requires several hundred milliseconds of time to reach a critical level
for consciousness, but that the subjective experience was referred backward in time
to the time of the evoked potential. Libet showed that the brain sends
information—conscious information or conscious experience—backward in time. But
people jumped all over him and got him to bend his story a bit. Roger Penrose
was the first one I’m aware of to say, in his 1989 book, that this is perfectly
allowable in quantum physics, because in quantum physics, when quantum collapse
or quantum state reduction occurs, quantum information is sent both forward and
backward in time. Aharonov has a dual vector theory which elaborates on that,
and entanglement, which we know connects nonlocally, may require backward time
effects. So backward time is perfectly permissible in quantum physics. To me it
means that what’s going on in the preconscious brain is quantum, and when it
reaches threshold, you have a moment of consciousness.
I want to add one more
point because I think this is really, really interesting. Dick Bierman, a good
friend of both of ours who did the experiments with Dean—beautiful work showing
this backward time effect—has been saying for many years to look at the raw
data in mainstream neuroscience. For example, he looked at Antonio Damasio’s
data and said there are backward time effects there. The subjects respond
before the signal (whatever it is, depending on the experiment) actually
appears and occurs. When Bierman asked Damasio about it, Damasio said, “That’s
crazy! That means there’s backward time, and that can’t be.” Bierman insisted
Damasio look at his data, but Damasio (a mainstream neuroscientist) just
wouldn’t go there.
More recently, Christof
Koch’s graduate student Moran Cerf reported on some studies from UCLA in which
seizure patients with electrodes implanted on their brain that mapped exactly
where the seizure focus is were shown a variety of famous and not-famous faces.
These depth electrodes find specific neurons that fire to a specific face. So
they find, aha! the Halle Berry neuron, which only fires when Halle Berry is
shown, or the Bill Clinton neuron, and so forth. I’ve heard this stuff for a
while, and although there are problems with extrapolating it to tell us
anything about consciousness, what is interesting was that when Moran Cerf
showed the video of the pictures appearing and the video of the nerves firing
on the same screen—the same time axis—the firing occurred about a half a second
before the faces appeared.
And he kept showing this over and over, and I’m sitting in the audience saying
to myself, the nerve is firing before the face appears. I asked Cerf about it,
and he said, we noticed that but it must be some statistical fluke. I said, you
can’t just blow it off like that because this is important stuff. So I started
bugging Christof about it, and to his credit he is trying to replicate Libet’s
study. They are looking at this seriously.
I was talking to somebody
today who said that a neuroscientist working with monkeys is seeing the exact
same thing: the monkey reacts before the image appears, by the same several
hundred milliseconds—up to two seconds—but even several hundred milliseconds is
a long time in the brain. The point is that this backward-time effect is now
appearing in mainstream neuroscience, and once people get over the fear of
being ridiculed, I think everybody is going to come out and say, Oh yeah! I see
that; everybody sees it. In the next few years we’re going to see this explode.
Schlitz: Clearly we’re living in the middle of some remarkable
paradigm shift. A question I’d love to ask you is, Where is it going? What is
the new story that is emerging? Here we are, living in a Newtonian world that
is imbued with all kinds of quantum effects and the complexities of that—the
nonsensical nature of quantum physics in a certain way. You and I both
collaborate with Deepak Chopra, who is a scientist and a bridge to a spiritual
tradition. What do you see as we’re looking forward? What you’ve just described
is a fundamental shift in mainstream science around some ideas that are still
pretty heretical. At the same time, a rapprochement is being built between
mainstream science and the world’s religious and spiritual traditions. What do
you sense is coming?
Hameroff: I think there’s a dichotomy—it’s like a political
situation that is going two ways at the same time; maybe one will win over the
other. I don’t know. For example, we have the “singularity” people talking
about how bigger computers will become conscious because, after all, the brain
is just a computer, and about transhumanism, and this and that about making
ourselves better and evolving, blah, blah, blah. I think it’s a bunch of
baloney, because I don’t think they have a clue what life is or what
consciousness is. They’re assuming and asserting that it’s a matter of complex
computation and that when they get enough bits operating in a complex enough
pattern, consciousness will happen. That’s their assertion and assumption, and
there’s absolutely no evidence for that. But there’s a lot of money behind
that; there’s a lot of PR and hype going in that direction.
The alternative view is
that we should get more in touch with our origin in terms of where we came from
in the universe and what we actually are. I think that consciousness is a
process literally on the edge between the quantum and classical worlds. You
mentioned the Newtonian world and this hidden quantum world. You know, it says
in the Kabbalah that there are two worlds and that consciousness dances on the
edge between the two. I think that’s right on the mark. I’m hoping that the
future will lead us to examine the nature of our existence more—what consciousness
actually is in the universe.
A few moments ago you
mentioned Edgar Mitchell and quantum holography. There’s a very interesting
thing that came out of trying to measure gravity waves at the most fundamental
level of the universe. They’ve been finding noise when they try to detect
gravity—quantum gravity, gravity waves—and that the noise repeats at different
scales, like every three or four orders of magnitude going up from the Planck
scale—the tiniest scale repeating every three or four orders of magnitude with
the same information. It’s called scale-free dynamics: the same information at
multiple levels. They’ve seen it all the way up to very close to biological
levels and within reach of microtubules, I would say. And from the other side,
Marcus Raichle, a well-known neuroscientist, is talking about scale-free
dynamics in the brain where you have holographic, fractal-like information. I
think these are going to connect through the microtubules and other structures.
In the future we’re going
to have a holographic universe, from the Planck scale up to consciousness and
brain processes. Deepak and I have been talking about how, when you meditate or
enter an altered state, you might be going deeper in terms of smaller scale,
faster, more dense information into holographic levels of the universe. That’s
very similar to what the Vedic mystics call locus—locations,
astral projections, and astral planes. Something like that may be physically
possible within cosmology and quantum physics in the not-too-distant future—at
least an understanding or an explanation how that might occur.
Schlitz: This is supported empirically by some of our
observations in the IONS lab, where we’re looking at some time-displacement
notions with experienced nondual meditators who, from a phenomenological point
of view, an experiential point of view, have this kind of deep wholeness that
isn’t divided into temporal sequences that define most of the days for most
normal people. There was a successful experiment looking at the ability of
nondual meditators to anticipate at a physiological level those targets that
would be exposed to them in the future. It supports what you just said about
these kind of meditative traditions actually allowing a greater access to the
whatever—let’s just call it the quantum field for lack of a better term—and
it’s very exciting.
From The Institute of Noetic
Sciences @ http://noetic.org/noetic/issue-thirteen-august/what-is-consciousness-hameroff/
For more information
about immortality see http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com/search/label/immortality
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This hope-instilling, but
extremely controversial theory by Lanza has many unwitting supporters, not just mere mortals who want
to live forever, but also some well-known scientists. These are the physicists
and astrophysicists who tend to agree with existence of parallel worlds and who
suggest the possibility of multiple universes. Multiverse (multi-universe) is a so-called scientific
concept, which they defend. They believe that no physical laws exist which
would prohibit the existence of parallel worlds.
