Originally posted on sciy.org by Ron Anastasia on Sun 12 Mar 2006 10:37 PM PST
I just received an email from Rod Hempsell, author of "Essays for the New Millennium," suggesting a dialogue about "Why should we asume that there is a direct relationship between quantum effects, dissipative structures, microtubules, etc. and consciousness?" I suggested we conduct the conversation here on SCIY and offered to post an article to which we can respond via comments.
Here's the article, a slightly edited version of my previously posted article on "Quantum Consciousness."
~ ron
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Quantum Consciousness and the "Mind" of the Cells
The quantum realm is the space of magic in modern physics. At the infinitesimal Planck scale, virtual particles flash in and out of existence with no apparent cause, yet are apparently the first cause of the subatomic particles which eventually concatenate up to all of material reality.
But modern science has no room for non-deterministic actors in its world view. Chaos theory admits that the sensitivity of complex systems to tiny initial fluctuations allows only probabilistic analysis of initial causes, but its ontology still claims that everything we see about us is nothing more than an ongoing chain of effect-effect-effect. It claims that everything that has been, is now, or will be flows deterministically from the earliest conceivable moment after the Big Bang when its unimaginably dense plasma expanded and cooled enough to allow the first virtual quantum particles to begin their mysterious dance. The prevailing scientific belief is that the tiny quantum effects simply cancel themselves out when averaged over their vast numbers occurring at human scale and larger.
The eschatology of modern science is that the continuing (and accelerating according to the latest data) expansion of of the cosmos will lead inexorably to the final death of all life and matter in the frigid cold and darkness of ultimate dispersal. Using the poetic language of Sri Aurobindo's epic story "Savitri," this dismal paradigm predicts the final victory of "The Lord of Death."
The majority of modern scientists believe human beings are also subject to the deterministic laws of ordinary physics, that free will and even consciousness itself are mere illusions. Most scientists confidently believe that the human brain is too "wet and noisy" for quantum fluctuations to impact neural processes. And the scale of the quantum realm is so many orders of magnitude smaller than human neurons that most neuroscientists dismissed the rash of books with titles like "Quantum Brain," "Quantum Mind," etc., as just another wave of New Age wishful thinking. Mystically oriented neurophysiologists like Nobelist Sir John Eccles searched in vain for the "quantum-box," human neural structures at the nanometer scale that might be able to respond to quantum fluctuations.
A few years ago a new level of neural structure began to appear under increasingly powerful microscopes. Most living cells contained a filigree of tiny solid rods which were named the "cytoskeleton," since it was assumed they served to maintain the structural shape of cells, sort of like the "bones of the cell." And they were micrometers in diameter, still 1000 times too big for quantum effects.
But something strange and wondrous has begun to appear in new investigations of neural cells. By the mid-90's, using a new generation of magnifying devices like tunneling electron microscopes, the cytoskeletal "rods" were being revealed to be hollow tubes, interconnected in a myriad of junctions within each cell. Within some human neural cellular structures, the complexity of these "microtubules" appeared to rival that of the entire human brain! And the tubulin proteins which form the skin of these microtubules are at the nanometer scale; Sir Eccles quantum box had been found.
The very latest experiments on advanced Tibetan Buddhist meditators (by a team including one of my former Ph.D. thesis advisors), are revealing high frequency coherent "gamma wave" EEG fluctuations in the range of 30 to 90 cycles per second (several times faster than the well-known "alpha" waves of novice meditators of approximately 10 cycles/sec.). There are now indications that in the brains of these Buddhist adepts, thousands of neurons at widely spaced locations are firing in coherent synchronization too perfectly timed to be controlled by normal relatively slow neural processes. Some researchers are now suggesting that these coherent oscillations can only be coordinated by strange "non-local" quantum effects. And the most recent results indicate that in the most advanced meditative states, hundreds of thousands of normally separate neurons appear to act as if they were one giant "hyper-neuron," interlinked by microtubules which leap through quantum-mediated "gap junctions."
So what's the meaning of all this and how does it possibly relate to Auroville? There's the obvious possibility that these experiments are revealing the physical basis of the Mother's work reported in Satprem's book "Mind of the Cells," and therefore have an intimate relationship to both the integral yoga and a possible new stage of evolution. Some world-class physicists, including Roger Penrose, the Oxford University polymath working on Unified Field Theory, are noting the possible relevance of quantum consciousness to the reports of Yogis of many traditions about their experience of an objectively real stratum of reality, of Satchitananda, or supramental Truth, Consciousness and Divine Bliss. Roger Penrose is now hypothesizing that many, perhaps all, creative leaps in human culture are the result of these quantum hyperneuronal states.
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