Consciousness and Quantum Mechanics
July 18, 2022
Roger Penrose
Abstract The human ability to achieve conscious understanding is argued to be a non-computational process. For this to be in accordance with physical laws requires something beyond current physical theory, in supplying a physical basis for “the collapse of the wave function”, demoted OR. This is argued to be an effect of gravitation on quantum mechanics. OR events are what allow a firm...
March 1, 2014
Stuart Hameroff, Roger Penrose
384 citations
The nature of consciousness, the mechanism by which it occurs in the brain, and its ultimate place in the universe are unknown. We proposed in the mid 1990's that consciousness depends on biologically 'orchestrated' coherent quantum processes in collections of microtubules within brain neurons, that these quantum processes correlate with, and regulate, neuronal synaptic and membrane activity,...
NeuroQuantology
September 3, 2007
Stuart R. Hameroff, Roger Penrose
202 citations
What is consciousness? Some philosophers have contended that qualia, or an experiential medium from which consciousness is derived, exists as a fundamental component of reality. Whitehead, for example, described the universe as being comprised of occasions of To examine this possibility scientifically, the very nature of physical reality must be re-examined. We must come to terms with the...
Views into the Chinese Room
August 22, 2002
Roger Penrose
Abstract I shall begin by recalling what I perceive to be the four polarities of viewpoint that I enunciated in Shadows of the Mind (Penrose 1994: 12) with regard to the relationship between conscious thought and computation: All thinking is computation; in particular, feelings of conscious aware ness are evoked merely by the carrying out of appropriate computations. Awareness is a feature of...
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
April 1, 2001
Roger Penrose
Abstract: Brain action is both physically controlled and beyond computational simulation. Accordingly, there is a strong case for examining brain organization in a way that specifically seeks out structures in the brain that might plausibly support such putative non‐computational action at the ill‐understood borderline between quantum and classical physics. Thus, we must seek out structures in...
Shadows of the Mind
August 22, 1996
Roger Penrose
Abstract What is the ultimate scope of science? Is it just the material attributes of our universe that are amenable to its methods, whereas our mental existence must forever lie outside its compass? Or might we someday come to a proper scientific understanding of the shadowy mystery of minds? Is the phenomenon of human consciousness something that is beyond the scope of scientific enquiry, or...
The MIT Press eBooks
March 26, 1996
Stuart R. Hameroff, Roger Penrose
82 citations
Abstract Features of consciousness difficult to understand in terms of conventional neuroscience have evoked application of quantum theory, which describes the fundamental behavior of matter and energy. In this paper we propose that aspects of quantum theory (e.g. quantum coherence) and of a newly proposed physical phenomenon of quantum wave function “self-collapse” (objective reduction: OR -...