Consciousness and Quantum Mind

Answering a question whether Consciousness has some underlying quantum basis, some thoughts which occurred to me:

Thank you for this important and fundamental question, which has perhaps deep connotations with not just the mind, but with the very essence of the Universe as well.

During my twenties and all the way till the end of my twenties and going into graduate studies, I was intrigued with consciousness and both quantum mechanics. I used to think while being an undergraduate student in physics if there were some fields emanating in our brain which correlated with or were the underlying basis of consciousness. During graduate studies and studying quantum mechanics, though I was fully occupied in particle physics, my specialization, it still intrigued if consciousness was a quantum mechanical effect. Although during my undergraduate studies I did not know what other people said about consciousness, but I even made a theory of my own about it, with some biological basis, starting with and from intrinsic cellular oscillations. Later on, after completing my graduate studies, I found out that physicists like Frohlich, Hameroff and Libov etc. had done great work in this direction, especially with tubulin dimers in microtubules in the cell cytoskeleton, and my ideas were not really completely wrong.

I learned further that even scientists like Max Planck and Erwin Schrodinger, some of the greatest physicists of all times and founders of quantum mechanics, had expressed deep insights about the subject. Since the times of Planck and Schrodinger, the debate has been on whether the consciousness has some underlying quantum basis.

The great master, Max Planck, himself said in his one historic quote,

Whereas,Schrodinger took a quantum leap in this direction, enunciating consciousness as something which cannot be encapsulated or expressed in physical terms.

In recent times, the most impressive work I have come across is by Sir Roger Penrose, a truly remarkable scientist I have great respect for.

Here is one of his beautiful lectures on the subject:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WXTX0IUaOg

Francis Crick, the scientist who discovered DNA, himself worked on consciousness during his last years of life and there is a paper he wrote during his last days on this subject. I can find it and post it here, or you can perhaps look it up off the web. It has been many years when I worked on this. He proposed in his last days Claustrum, which is a structure in deep brain, as the possible seat of consciousness.

Now, this is all what I can generally say about the topic from others’ perspective, what I heard or studied myself.

In terms of my own ideas and work, for a long time off and on I thought about this topic and even did a number of experiments. It started with my closing my eyes back then in my college days and trying to perceive how thoughts could have topological or electromagnetic features in my brain. All I could surmise was that the signals were non-local, they could not be pin-pointed in my brain, and moreover they could actually project in all directions outside my brain. This is something which I wanted to express more tangibly and tried to make a model. I was not trained then, was just a student, later I chose to go into particle physics, but before my studies and after completion, I tried detecting signals from cells etc. similar to what others have reported, even trying to make a model, just as so many people have made, but we all reach to similar conclusions, in the spirit of Planck and Schrodinger. Even if consciousness exists with some underlying quantum basis, it is extremely difficult to sense and measure it. First the brain’s environment is too wet and warm for quantum phenomena to happen. Second, there is a lot of damping by the brain tissue, which effectively kills all the biophotons etc produced within the folds of the cerebral cortex. Third, the signals have a lot of underlying basis and you cannot pin-point to a single source, unfortunately.

Now when I think about it, I also reach the similar conclusions like Planck and Schrodinger, consciousness is something more fundamental and has more universal underpinnings, correlations and connections with it. It is not limited to the subject to quantum mind, but it transcends beyond all knowledge and extends itself to infinity, and all the way to theology. There is a mind which is perhaps superset of all minds created.

Perhaps consciousness is like a black hole or like big bang, it is a singularity which cannot be rationally explained. I would personally start from building an understanding of consciousness on the lines of a black hole, because to me it does not seem different from that.

This is all I can say at this moment. I wish I had more time to write about it.

It is definitely a great area, and I called it the last frontier of human science in some of my lectures some years ago.

I have been lately out of touch with this subject for five years now. You could find more about it on the web, from reliable scientific sources (not Sci Fi!).

Here are some of the papers I found for general study and a video by Prof. David Chalmers, who has expounded pretty well on this topic even correlating it with the collapse of the wavefunction:
Discovery of quantum vibrations in ‘microtubules’ corroborates theory of consciousness
Quantum Mind

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIBT6E2GtjA

Wish you all the best in the quest for quantum mind!

Mobin Khan

2 August 2018