Bleeping Herald - Why don’t we see superposition in the classical world?

Stuart Hameroff: Yeah, well that is the big question and there are several ideas about that (Copenhagen interpretation, many worlds theory, decoherence). … The nice thing about the way Roger poses the problem is that, in the beginning it’s very much like the multiple worlds hypothesis, where a superposition actually is a separation in underlying reality. So in multiple worlds, when you have a dead cat and a live cat, or let’s say a spin up and a spin down electron., the universe at the most fundamental level that’s describing those two superpositions actually separates and in the multiple worlds view they go on to form two separate parallel universes, if you will. Now what Penrose said was that, the superposition is indeed, a separation in underlying space time geometry in the universe at its most fundamental level. But that the separation or bubble, if you will, or blister, is unstable and after a specific time will self-collapse to one or the other states. And he quantifies this using the Indeterminacy Principle, which is a very simple equation which basically says that the larger the separation the faster it will self-collapse. …

So for example, if you had a single electron which has a very low mass, in superposition, and isolate it from the environment, if you could somehow do that … it would meet threshold for self-collapse in ten million years. OK? Now if you had a one kilogram object, like Schrodinger’s cat, it would reach threshold and self-collapse in ten to the minus 37 seconds. Very fast. So it basically takes care of the Schrondinger’s cat problem because a large system, if amplified, would basically self-collapse immediately.

Now, the interesting thing that Roger said in his first book and has been saying, is that this type of self-collapse, this objective reduction, is caused by intrinsic properties in the universe, and at the fundamental level of the universe, causes the choice of dead cat vs. live cat, or spin up vs spin down or whatever, to not be random, but to have some, what he calls, a non-computable influence.

This is where it gets really interesting. Because Roger is a Platonist. You know Plato said that there’s an absolute world of absolute truths and aesthetic beauty and mathematical geometry and so forth. But in Plato’s view this was an abstract world, it didn’t exist in a physical sense. Now what Roger’s said is that Plato’s world does exist in a physical sense, embedded or encoded at the most fundamental basic level of the universe. And this is called the Planck scale.

You know it brings up the question, ‘what is the universe made of?’ Because if you go down in scale, smaller and smaller, I mean when you come to atoms, atoms are mostly empty space between the nucleus and an electron, and huge compared to the size of either of them. And in between atoms, of course, is empty space. And you go down in scale…. You go twenty five orders of magnitude smaller than atoms, eventually you come to… things are kind of smooth on the way down, if you can imagine yourself shrinking down and down, and things are kind of smooth until you finally come to a scale where there’s some kind of structure; there’s some kind of irregularity or coarseness; there’s some kind of information. And this is called the Planck scale . 10 to the -33 cm

Dr. Stuart Hameroff

And this is the fabric of the universe if you will. And how to describe it is a big question, whether it’s string theory or quantum gravity or quantum geometry or twisted theory – there’s a number of approaches. But, you know, we really don’t know what the right answer is at this point, except to say at that scale there’s some kind of coarseness or irregularity.

And what Penrose said, is that this is information that is Platonic information; that somehow Platonic information is embedded at this level. You have to say it’s kind of embedded non-locally or holographically, so that all of the information is everywhere wherever you go, it’s there.

BH – Could you equate that to Jung’s archetypes?

SH – Yeah, I think you could equate it to the collective unconscious, the Buddhist Universal Mind, the Kabbalah, to a lot of mystical traditions, absolutely. And by the way, Roger won’t go there in terms of making this connection to any spiritual or mystical connection. Because he just won’t comment on it. I’ve prodded him a little bit, but he just doesn’t want to go there. So I’m taking a liberty to some extent, making this extrapolation.

The point is, this kind of objective reduction is influenced by this Platonic information, and he calls it the non-computable influence. And in his first book, The Emperor’s New Mind he, in a round about way he tried to prove that human thought, human choices, human understanding required this type of non-computable influence. Which is something other than complete algorithmic determinism and randomness. There’s some kind of third choice besides algorithmic determinism and randomness And that would be this non-computable influence, which is kind of like this giant, humongous look-up table of Platonic truths that influence our thoughts and perceptions and choices - if we allow them to; if we’re kind of mindful and don’t act rashly and compulsively and just are kind of mindful about things. We can be influenced by this type of choice.

BH – So how does this equate to gravity effects on superpositions?

SH – Well, it’s quantum gravity. And gravity is kind of the macroscopic large scale property of what’s happening at the small scale. It’s kind of like… temperature is a large-scale property of vibrations at the molecular level. If you took one molecule, it doesn’t have any temperature, it has vibration, it has energy. And if you take a whole bunch of molecules together you get temperature. And similarly, it’s quantum gravity which refers to the five-structure of the universe. And gravity, as we know, it kind of comes out of that at a higher level. So quantum gravity underlies gravity, but it’s not the same. It’s kind of like the relation between vibration and temperature. They’re related but not the same.

And by the way, by doing this he’s trying to bring together relativity and quantum mechanics,