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BH – So how does this affect – or translate if you will – through the microtubules in the brain?

SH – Well, you need some kind of way to connect all this to the brain, into our actions. And when Roger first wrote his book, he said there must be some kind of quantum computer in the brain that is sensitive to these Platonic influences embedded in the Planck Scale. He didn’t really know what that might be. He thought it might be a superposition of neurons both firing and not firing for example. But at that point in the early 1990s, I’d been studying microtubules for about 20 years. And my thing was that, to understand the brain you couldn’t just go to the level of neurons as bits or switches in a brain computer. Because each neuron was incredibly complicated and you had to go deeper inside each neuron, to the next level down, which was the microtubules which seemed to me to be perfectly designed computers. They’re designed to process information at the molecular scale much faster and much more information than neurons. So they’re kind of like the nervous system within each neuron. So it takes the information processing down to another level. And in this case the bits states, the on/off, the 1/0 are individual proteins within the microtubules which are controlled by quantum forces inside the proteins. And I knew about this because I had been studying anesthesia – anesthetic gases, and they worked at the quantum mechanical level by impairing that protein dynamic.

So, I had been going around to neuronet conferences and whatever, saying, “No, the brain isn’t just 100 billion neurons interacting where the neurons are like the bits. Each neuron is incredibly complicated and the bits are one level down - at least in the subunits of the microtubules.” But then people would say, “Well, okay, so you’re right. How would that explain consciousness?” And I had to admit they were right. I was saying you had to go down to that level, but it still didn’t really explain why we have conscious experience. Which is really a tough question.

So when I read Roger’s book, it seemed to me he had the mechanism, in this quantum gravity collapse, but he didn’t have the right structure. And I had the right structure but I didn’t have the right mechanism. So I wrote to him and we got together and developed this model that came out about 11 years ago.

BH – So the classical manifestation of quantum gravity keeps me stuck in one room at the computer and not simultaneously in the kitchen cooking. And quantum gravity collapsing superpositions at the Planck Scale and affecting microtubules in the neurons in my brain is affecting my consciousness. But what if I could transcend quantum gravity in consciousness in a deep meditative state?

SH– I think what you’re asking is … you’re not transcending quantum gravity, because quantum gravity is what everything’s made of. I think what you’re saying is that your consciousness can …let me put it this way. I’m going to back up and answer your question in a bit of a round about way. You know about near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences?

BH – Yes.

SH – About five years ago there were two medical studies in Europe about near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences, and the BBC decided to do a show about it (The Day I Died). And they asked, “How do you explain these out-of-body experiences?” And they said, “We don’t know. Ask Hameroff and Penrose.” Anyway, what I said was, under normal

circumstances, consciousness is happening at the fundamental level of space time geometry, in the microtubules inside of our brain. Okay? So it’s happening in the brain, but it’s happening at the level of the brain that’s the most fundamental level of the universe… this space/time geometry of the Planck scale. So when the microtubules lose their energy source and stop the coherent pumping that drives the quantum coherence and the connection to the physical body… the quantum information that makes up your, if not your consciousness, at least your unconscious… your kind of dream-world self, can kind of dissipate into the space/time geometry at large and no longer be confined in the brain. And because it’s holographic and distributed and non-local, it kind of maintains identity, or stays entangled and maintains an identity so you can have consciousness kind of at-large in the universe without the body. And then when the brain gets revived it kind of gets pulled back in.

But I think in certain types of meditation and other states that that might happen. That consciousness becomes more or less at-large rather than confined.

BH – But isn’t this like a wheel, within a wheel, within a wheel? Because if quantum gravity is, as Penrose suggests, affected at the Planck Scale level by information he likens to the Platonic Ideals, isn’t that in itself a form of consciousness? Wouldn’t that mean that quantum gravity itself was a phenomenon of consciousness?

SH – Yeah, that’s a good point. I would say it’s proto-conscious, or it’s more like our unconscious dream world, because it would have to reach threshold for self-collapse to have a moment of consciousness.

But that brings up an interesting question that I have talked with Roger about, and that is, what about situations in the universe where you can have large scale superpositions other than in biology? For example in a very large neutron star, you can have very large superpositions … of course nobody knows, but I would say that in that case where you’re having a lot of objective reductions but there’s no information. So it might be a state of pure consciousness without any cognition, without any information.

BH – And no self-awareness obviously.

SH – No self awareness, but it could be just pure awareness with no self.

Now there’s also a very interesting theory put forth by an Italian astrophysicist, and her name is Paola Zizzi. And she says… I mean if you say that the Planck Scale, quantum gravity has this Platonic information, proto-consciousness, ethical values… where did it all come from? Well it had to come from the Big Bang. And you may know that during the Big Bang there was a period called inflation where the universe was expanding very, very rapidly. And then,after a certain very short time within the Big Bang, I think it was like 10 to the – 33 seconds or something like that. Within the Big Bang inflation stopped and the universe has been expanding slowly ever since. But during that first fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a second, it was expanding very, very rapidly. And this was called inflation and nobody’s ever really explained why it stopped. And Paola did some calculations and her theory is that, during the Big Bang’s period of inflation, the universe was in superposition of multiple possible universes, and she applied Penrose’s equation I mentioned and basically said that at the end of inflation the universe met Roger’s threshold for objective reduction and had an objective reduction and self-collapsed and basically chose the universe we now have.