Originally posted on sciy.org by Ron Anastasia on Fri 22 Jul 2005 01:34 AM PDT
From: Ron (rjon@vzavenue.net)
Date: July 22, 2005 5:27:56 AM EDT
To: postaum2005@sriaurobindocenter-la.com Subject: Re: CMVEV - When did consciousness begin?
Note:
I've noticed that it's hard to distinguish individual messages in a
thread because they all have the same "Re: ..." subject name. So I'm
going to try naming my messages on this thread with the abbreviation
CMVEV (Challenging the Materialist View of the Evolution of
Consciousness), then add a subject title relating to its primary
content.
For example, I'll call this posting: "CMVEV - When did
consciousness begin?" - Let me know if this works for you.
________________
Hi Don,
I'll respond to your first question in this message, others in later posts.
You ask:
>1. When did consciousness begin?
1)
Who knows? But I do like Hameroff's idea that consciousness began in
the Cambrian explosion about 540 million years ago. As you point out we
have to be careful about how we're using terms like consciousness,
awareness, intelligence, etc. So I'll be using the word "consciousness"
to mean moments of self-awareness, not just the act of doing something,
but the added awareness that one has done so.
- My main reason
for focusing on Hameroff's (& Penrose's) ideas is their obvious
relation to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother's work.
2) Current
theories estimate the Earth's age to be about 4.5 billion years. It
took approximately 700 million years for an ocean and atmosphere to
form and become possible for life, which then appeared very quickly,
perhaps in just a few 10s of millions of years. In his book "Quantum
Evolution" that I cited in a previous post, McFadden points out that
isotopic signatures of photosynthesis show up in rocks 3.8 billion*
years old and "microbial fossils are visible in the earliest
non-metamorphosed rocks (those that haven't been melted) that are about
3.5 billion* years old." [Note corrections to *Billions* of years old
vs. my earlier typos of "Millions of years old."]
- Hameroff then picks up the story and points out that:
"For
its first 3.5 billion years or so ('pre-Cambrian period') life seems to
have evolved slowly, producing only single cells and a few simple
multicellular organisms. The most significant life forms for the first
2 billion years of this period were algae and bacteria-like
prokaryotes. Then, about 1.5 billion years ago, eukaryotic cells
appeared apparently as symbiotic mergers of previously independent
organelles (mitochondria, plastids) with prokaryotic cells. ...
Pre-Cambrian eukaryotic cells continued to slowly evolve for another
billion or so years, resulting only in simple multicellular organisms.
Then,
in a rather brief 10 million years beginning about 540 million years
ago, there apparently occurred a world-wide dramatic acceleration in
the rate of evolution: the 'Cambrian explosion.' A vast array of
diversified life abruptly emerged; all the phyla from which today's
animals [and humans] are descended."
3) So, what precipitated
the Cambrian explosion? As Hameroff puts it, "... did a threshold of
biological genetic complexity occur? Can a particular biological
functionality be identified that critically enhanced adaptation,
survivability and mutation?"
- Hameroff notes that: "...
purposeful behavior surely occurred in unicellular eukaryotic ancestors
of modern organisms like paramecia and euglena who perform rather
complex adaptive movements." - But how can single cell organisms
possibly exhibit purposeful behavior, which most of us associate with
at least primitive brains -- organized complexes of hundreds,
thousands, or millions of individual cells called neurons? - Hameroff
points out that "having no synapses or neural networks, paramecia and
similar organisms rely on their cytoskeleton for sensation, locomotion
and information processing. The cytoskeleton organizes intelligent
behavior in eukaryotic cells."
4) Cytoskeletons occur within all
cells. They got their name because when they were first discovered they
were thought to perform a structural function maintaining the shape of
cells. - But in recent years more powerful microscopes have disclosed a
complex structure inside cytoskeletons, the most important of which for
this discussion are called 'microtubules' (MTs). - At first thought to
be solid rods, scanning electron micrographs have revealed that they
are tiny hollow cylinders (about 25 nanometers in diameter) each formed
of 13 protofilaments composed of polymers of alpha and beta tubulin.
5)
The stage is now set for Hameroff and Penrose's (H&R) new idea. -
They propose that the Cambrian explosion occurred when a threshold
level of cytoskeleton size and complexity was reached through normal
evolutionary processes. - When this level of complexity was reached, a
self-organizing quantum process began to occur on the surface and
perhaps inside the microtubules, operating at the interface between
quantum and macroscopic states. - Their claim is that this level of
complexity allowed the appearance of primitive consciousness for the
first time on Earth. (This is the specific answer to your question re
when did consciousness appear.)
6) Penrose calls this process
"objective reduction" (OR). - He has done sophisticated mathematics
based on Godel's Theorem which implies that raw "protoconscious'
information" may be encoded in spacetime geometry at the fundamental
Planck scale, the smallest possible space and time dimensions where
spacetime itself becomes quantized. - As I've mentioned in previous
posts, Penrose's mathematics implies that mathematical truths and
perhaps other 'Platonic ideals" like beauty, harmony and goodness also
exist at this level. - I'll skip the technical details on the quantum
physics of OR.
7) Because intelligence and even primitive
consciousness confer survival advantages, H&R propose that
evolution suddenly proceeded exponentially, the Cambrian explosion
occurred, and this in turn led, through a process they called
"Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Orch OR) to the evolution of
increasingly 'conscious' organisms such as plants and animals, and
eventually humans. Hameroff describes it this way: - "... [Q]uantum
coherent superposition develops in microtubule subunit proteins
('tubulins') within brain neurons and glia. The quantum state is
isolated from environmental decoherence by cycles of actin gelation,
and connected among neural and glial cells by quantum tunneling across
gap junctions. When the quantum gravity threshold is reached according
to E=h/T, self-collapse (objective reduction) abruptly occurs. - "The
pre-reduction, coherent superposition ('quantum computing') phase is
equated with pre-conscious processes, and each instantaneous OR, or
self-collapse, corresponds with a discrete conscious event. -
"Sequences of events give rise to a 'stream' of consciousness.
Microtubule- associated-proteins (MAPS) 'tune' the quantum oscillations
and the OR is thus self-organized, or 'orchestrated' ('Orch OR). -
"Each Orch OR event selects microtubule subunit states non-computably
[this is important, will discuss later] which classically regulate
synaptic/neural functions. Because the superposed protein mass
separation is also a separation in underlying spacetime geometry, each
Orch OR event selects a particular 'funda-mental' experience." [Where
they can be influenced by the Platonic values embedded at the Planck
scale of spactime.]
6) Since this quote has probably raised more
questions than it's answered, I'd better stop here for now. I see that
I blew my attempt to keep this post short. I'm not practiced enough
writing about this material to keep it succinct.
For those
interested in technical details see Hameroff's paper "Did Consciousness
Cause the Cambrian Evolutionary Explosion?" at:
"Quantum Consciousness"
Namaste,
~ ron
Attachment: