Fringe-ology (12 page)

The book is essentially a dense, knotty, intellectual ode to the microtubule. These unbelievably tiny, 25-nanometer-wide tubes were only discovered (and accepted) in the 1960s. And Hameroff seems delighted, recounting the accidental way they blinked into view. “The solution used to affix cells to a microscope slide was changed,” he says, “so at first people thought microtubules were an anomaly produced by the new solution.”

In reality, the old solution had been dissolving microtubules before scientists could have the pleasure of seeing them. Eventually, scientists did accept the reality of the microtubule, which proved ubiquitous, appearing in literally every biological cell—plant or animal—on the planet. Scientists also discovered, more slowly, over decades, that the microtubule is perhaps the single most versatile biological component in nature. The way our own bones keep our flesh from piling up in a heap on the floor, microtubules are the cytoskeleton that supports the structure of every cell. But they also act as conveyor belts inside cells, moving needed chemical components from one cell to another. And they are capable of moving them
selves
, comprising the levers, so to speak, that divide chromosomes.

Hameroff has come to believe that microtubules are essential for understanding human consciousness. And by way of argument, he points to a single-celled organism, the humble paramecium, which lacks the neurons and synapses we boast in our brains. “The paramecium swims around, finds food, finds a mate, and avoids danger,” says Hameroff. “But it doesn't always swim toward food or away from danger. It seems to make choices and it definitely seems to process information.”

How, precisely, can a brainless cell be said to
know
when it is time to divide, eat, or mate? Hameroff says the information processing takes place in the microtubule, which gives the cell its shape
and
comprises the source of its primitive form of thinking. He published papers on these ideas but found resistance everywhere. Microtubules were initially easier to understand as simple girders, so there was an intellectual and scientific utility in denying them any further purpose. But he found the greatest resistance to his research among proponents of artificial intelligence (AI).

Supporters of hard AI say that once we have computer bits and switches processing information with the same computational power as the human brain, we'll succeed in recreating human intelligence—and consciousness. But they set their timelines for when this might be achieved and write their funding and research proposals based purely on the computational power of neurons alone. “I was telling them to push the goal posts way back,” says Hameroff, “to account for all these microtubules processing information
inside
the neuron. They didn't like that.”

Of course not.

No one wants to be told the holy grail of his career is at best decades further down the road. So Hameroff began collecting intellectual enemies early in his career.
Ultimate Computing
was his cannon shot at their broadsides. Hameroff admits that, for a time, he puffed himself up with the idea that the sheer, extra computing power suggested by microtubules explained consciousness. Then a friend approached him, and with the wisdom of Socrates, merely asked a probing question: “Say you're right,” the friend said, “and all this processing is going on inside the microtubules. So what? How does that explain consciousness?”

To his chagrin, Hameroff realized his friend was right. He had, like the hard AI proponents themselves, merely put forth a kind of faith-based argument: if we assemble enough computing power, in the right formation, we'll get Data from
Star Trek
—a conscious machine with a sense of self and a personal narrative, with goals and wishes and the ability to appreciate, viscerally, the beauty of a well-composed sonata. The problem is that there is no understood mechanism by which our own sense of self is generated. How do the firings of different networks of neurons, how would computation produce any sensation or thought at all? Hameroff now realized he had provided no answer. Merely driving the discussion further down, inside the neuron to the microtubule, suggested how much raw computing power human beings hold—but it didn't solve the mind-body problem, the riddle of consciousness. Not even close. Thrust back into this state of wonder, into a state of open-mindedness, Hameroff found himself alone one night, several years after he published
Ultimate Computing
. He was in his early forties and living in a house in the Tucson desert, reading a book by Roger Penrose.

A British mathematical physicist, Penrose reached a new level of intellectual and popular celebrity with the book,
The
Emperor's New Mind
, a bestselling yet densely scientific tome that leads readers through physics, cosmology, mathematics, and philosophy, all to arrive at the mystery of consciousness. Interspersing pages of equations with lucid descriptions of complicated scientific concepts, Penrose overturns several apple carts at once. And Hameroff gobbled up the details.

Penrose's book argues that the difference between us and a computer is one of understanding. Computers will at times grind on forever without finding a solution. But a human mind can step back from these calculations and understand when they are headed nowhere. Most famously, Penrose builds a logical argument off the work of mathematician Kurt Gödel, which demonstrates that some mathematical statements can neither be proven nor disproven—cannot be computed—yet we as human beings can still know them to be true or untrue. This ability to grasp information that cannot be expressed computationally suggests to Penrose that there must be something other than computation at work in the human mind.

Hameroff was already transfixed. It was late at night. But he didn't want to go to bed. He felt himself alone in a pool of lamplight, exposed to some of the most important ideas he had ever read. The reductionistic view of the workings of mind and brain, so dominant throughout science, was being systematically demolished in the 500-page book in his hands. But it was toward the end of
Emperor,
when Hameroff perceived his own personal connection to the material, that he realized Penrose might
need
him. Because at the end of his book, after swimming through hundreds of pages of dense science and mathematics, Penrose the author surfaces in what seems a new world—a world, Penrose surmises, in need of a new physics.

In his closing pages, Penrose speculates that the key to understanding consciousness lies in quantum mechanics. In his view, the Newtonian worldview of
deterministic
physics isn't sufficient to explain consciousness as the pinging of neurons, equivalent to the bits and switches of a computer carrying out computations. So perhaps, he suggests, some clue to the answer lies in the more complicated,
indeterminate
nature of quantum mechanics. In fact, Penrose argues that human thinking speaks to the existence of something
beyond
both classical and quantum physics, something that includes and perhaps transcends the two.

I describe the quantum in greater detail later, but for now, understand this: Penrose knew he lacked evidence for the quantum-based part of his thesis. In fact, the bulk of then-current evidence—or at least, then-current scientific thinking—suggested he was wrong. Given this conflict, what area of the brain might be able to house the tenuous, fragile operations of the quantum?

At the end of his book, Penrose flatly admits he isn't sure. But he extends a bony finger down into the subatomic realm just the same, saying,
Here is where the answer must lie
. And Hameroff, sitting alone in his house, looked at where Penrose was pointing and realized he had in fact already been there—through his research into the microtubule. Sitting there that night, he realized that he—an anesthesiologist sitting up too late, reading in his desert home—might be the one who could help Penrose take the next step.

H
AMEROFF'S LIFE MOVED AWFULLY
quickly from there.

He contacted Penrose and was invited to meet with the eminent scientist on Oxford's campus. Hameroff had friends in England and got on a plane. When he finally arrived he was, like most people, immediately taken with Penrose—his impish smile and piercingly intelligent eyes. “Roger's just . . . on another level,” says Hameroff.

Penrose's office was crowded with books and papers stacked up in great heaps all over the desk and floor. He turned to Hameroff casually, with the practiced air of a professor used to addressing students. Hameroff wondered if he might have flown all this way to get a quick hook.

Hameroff talked. Penrose mostly listened, asking for a point of clarification whenever he thought it necessary. Otherwise, he remained silent—his face inscrutable. Hameroff laid out the basic understood facts of microtubules and the less well-known role these tiny structures seemed to play in human consciousness. Activity in the microtubules is constant, Hameroff told him, except when a patient is under anesthesia. Anesthetic gases work by means of weak, London forces, intermolecular forces caused by quantum dynamics. This loss of awareness under anesthesia could be the key, he said, to understanding a quantum theory of consciousness.

Hameroff felt he had made his best case. But Penrose just smiled, thanked him for his time, and shook his hand.

Hameroff walked out on to the Oxford campus, thinking that was the end of his relationship with Roger Penrose. “I didn't think he was impressed with the idea at all,” he says. “I mean, I took my shot and that was it.”

A couple of days later, Hameroff was still in London, when a friend met him in a pub. “Have you heard,” he asked, “about the talk Roger Penrose just gave?”

The scientist had apparently just delivered a lecture on
The Emperor's New Mind
. And in closing, he made an announcement that caused quite a stir in the crowd. He had just met with an American scientist named Stuart Hameroff, who had explained to him that microtubules could be the structure he was looking for to develop his quantum theory of consciousness. Penrose had liked his idea after all. And over the ensuing months the pair met, often, to refine their thinking. What they came up with would, at least in terms of the pop culture zeitgeist, capture the moment.

I promised, or perhaps threatened might be a better word, to address quantum mechanics a bit more fully in this chapter. And so I shall. Interested readers who would like to understand it more technically and in all its confusing glory should consult the Notes and Sources at the back of this book. But what readers most need to understand is this: disputes about quantum mechanics seem to revolve less around the science of QM than what that science
means
.

In other words, the scientific method has sussed out a lot of facts about the subatomic realm. But what those facts say, or don't say, about the nature of the universe and, well, reality, remains a matter of debate. And so we are in a curious position, at this time in our history, as a species: the science we believe describes the underpinnings of our world is embraced by some—New Agers, mostly—as the foundation of both matter and spirituality. Their philosophy is that the strange properties of the quantum suggest some mystical component to the nature of man. Others, mostly materialists and atheists, accept that QM describes the subatomic but deny it has any importance beyond that.
Their
philosophy is such that we can still understand our world and ourselves in the light shed by Newtonian physics—all is matter, smacking this way and that.

The result is that, by invoking the quantum realm, Hameroff and Penrose stepped right into an ongoing culture war—in which two opposing sides are claiming they know exactly what to make of the quantum, though the truth is, we can't yet claim that kind of knowledge.

In the quantum universe, particles regularly perform seemingly impossible feats: appearing in two places at once; communicating information across distances; blinking out of existence in one spot and reappearing suddenly in another.

Here are just a few of the stranger quantum findings, each of which has been confirmed by numerous scientific experiments: separate particles of matter can maintain nonlocal connections, called “entanglement.” In instances in which particles have become entangled, a change to the state of one particle results in an immediate, corresponding change in the other. These connections persist across any distance, from meters to miles.

In the phenomenon of quantum tunneling, described briefly in chapter 2, a particle can pass right through a seemingly impervious barrier.

Then there is superposition, in which subatomic matter is said to exist in all its possible states at once—until it is interfered with in some way. At that point, the wave of possibilities is said to “collapse” and assume a measurable state. Even then, a precise, complete measurement remains impossible. We can know a quantum particle's position, for instance, but not its velocity. If we choose instead to measure its speed, we cannot know its place. These findings have been with us, in something approaching their modern form, ever since Max Planck and Albert Einstein first began working on the conundrum of how light can display the properties of both a particle and a wave.

Think of a particle as a billiard ball, located in a specific place and completely distinct from the other billiard balls on the table. Propelled by some outside force, the billiard balls might interact, hurtling into one another with a satisfying
thwack
and moving on in completely predictable ways. But any one billiard ball is decidedly
not
another billiard ball, and cannot be. Now conversely think of a wave as . . . a
wave
. Rather than being local to one space, a wave is spread out. Waves can in fact interfere with one another, joining and unjoining as in a roiling surf. This is the Newtonian world that we live in and observe every day. But QM has revealed an entirely different reality, in which light has proven to be both particle and wave.