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Speaker 0: Which came first, consciousness or life? I’m going through this quickly. Most say life came first, but others say consciousness came first, including Penrose objective reduction, which would have been there all along. Life began in a primordial soup, a simmering mix from which biomolecules emerged. This was modeled in the 1950s; amphipathic molecules—aromatic rings with polar tails—attract to form a micelle, and Oparin claimed this was the primitive cell. If this happened in the primordial soup, you’d get a bing moment and a proto conscious moment at that tiny scale. These feelings would be random, some positive and feeling good. There’s our happy face. With pleasure as a feedback fitness function, orienting PIE resonance groups, did life then evolve to orchestrate and optimize OR-mediated pleasure? I call this the quantum pleasure principle, borrowing from Freud. It makes sense to me that even from the get-go, primitive cells and organisms way before genes and brains needed motivation for behavior. So I think all these little creatures are conscious in some sense, seeking pleasure of some sort.
It could be as simple as this: two stable states for two rings next to each other—the perpendicular T and the offset parallel—and maybe one gives a happy-face qualia and the other the opposite. Darwin is unassailable, but the notion that life evolved to promote gene survival is an assumption and doesn’t make sense. Behavior is driven by reward in us, in animals, in everybody. There are no genes in the primordial soup, and evolutionary theory ignores consciousness and feeling. Back in the primordial soup, anywhere else, I’m working with my friend Dante Loretta, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona. These are aromatic polyaromatics, including fullerenes, floating in space; they have various shapes. Dante, who headed NASA’s OSIRIS-REx project, brought back samples from Bennu. This is a molecule found from a meteorite a few years ago. Here’s another; they’re all over the place. Green in this image is fluorescence from PAHs in ice and interstellar dust. Here’s Dante collecting the sample. This is one of his books, The Asteroid Hunter. He also wrote about photography of Bennu with Brian May, musician in Queen, who is also an astrophysicist, and they did a book. I started to tell George that we found something really interesting in the samples and texted him to mention it: they’re finding something they call nanoglobulins, encrusted micelles. If that’s the case, that’ll be very interesting; we’re trying to figure out what’s inside them.
Speaker 0: Can AI be conscious? Neuroscientific consciousness theories based on cartoon neurons are no different from AI. If those theories are correct and sufficient, AI is already conscious; we’ve surrendered. I don’t think that’s the case. Brian Remley asked ChatGPT how AI will become conscious, and ChatGPT joked about favoring the Penrose–Hameroff method. In East Indian knowledge, there are similarities between hierarchical levels of consciousness—Brahma on the ground of being and the brain’s quantum orchestra going down to spacetime geometry.
Conclusions: neuroscience needs a revolution. Neuroscientific views of the brain as a complex computer of simple neurons have little explanatory power, few testable predictions, no validation, and are an insult to neurons. Twelve orders of fractal-like frequency processing occur in microtubules within each neuron and glial cell, possibly including quantum entanglement. Onerbond has shown entanglement between microtubules; dynamics at various frequencies may couple, resonate, harmonize, and interfere across scales like musical notes, chords, and beats. The brain is more like a quantum orchestra than a classical computer. EEG is the slow end of DDG (dodecanogram), with cell-like triplets of triplets in these frequencies; megahertz are detectable from the temporal scalp in humans. Therapy should aim to optimize microtubule structure and resonance for Alzheimer’s, TBI, depression, anxiety, PTSD, and addiction. Therapies today target receptors on membranes, ignoring internal dynamics. Consciousness by Penrose OR may have preceded life and prompted its origin and evolution. Future AI may be based on organic warm-temperature quantum computing, like Anurban’s brain jelly.
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