Brain Strings
Consciousness is “metaphorically more like music than computation”
I freaked myself out reading about Orch OR before bed the other night.
Orch OR is a theory that says consciousness arises from quantum mechanical processes playing dirty little tricks upon the “microtubules” inside of our neurons. Orchestrated objective reduction theory.1
It might be junk science. It might not be. Anything to do with quantum mechanics or the mystery of consciousness is ripe for sensationalism and fame-seeking. But Orch OR is being studied in labs at Princeton, Stanford, and other universities, and its main proponent is a Nobel Laureate and a knight.
The idea is that a part of the walls of cells have electrical and chemical properties that make them a good candidate for a link between the body and subatomic vibrations. Microtubules, the part of the cell in question, are super thin tubes made of proteins with electron clouds inside of them. Some experiments so far have shown that microtubules do things that we would only expect other substances that are sensitive to quantum processes to do (for example, microtubules can absorb light and reemit it more than a second later in a process probably associated with quantum “superradiance”2). And there’s also some reason to believe that anesthesia suspends consciousness by dampening the function of microtubules, muting their vibrations.3
If microtubules inside neurons are subject to quantum mechanical processes, then they might be like quantum computers. Microtubules are partly responsible for how cells talk to each other, how cells divide, and even how cells move around. It’s almost as if they have a mind of their own. And if the claims of Orch OR are true, then microtubules can be thought to manifest physics from the lower, tinier, quantum realm into our bodies, our thoughts, and the world we know.4
Reading about it in bed the other night, I got to feeling like microtubules are dream catchers, wind chimes, microphone diaphragms picking up invisible subatomic currents that pass through them. I started to worry that the quarks or bosons or whatever particle-wave apparitions were all piercing through me, strumming my neural strings, defining who I am and what I do. I felt like I was disintegrating from my bed and recombining with the cotton comforter. I felt like I was superpositioning to the other side of the world and shredding into a trillion ribbons. I felt like someone had peered into universal source code. And then I fell asleep. (I’m ok, Mom!)
It’s not that I don’t want to be influenced by external things.5 On the contrary, I know that everything we do is a product of what we take in, the opinions of our friends, the sunniness or cloudiness of the sky today, our blood sugar levels. But those are slow-motion influences, and somewhat nameable, and they come to you through your senses. The constant collision with universal forces described by Orch OR is more relentless and intimate than that. It’s kind of like the link that religious people and secular humanists talk about all the time: the thread between you and the universe, the connection between all things. To know something about its mechanics would be exciting. It would also be terrifying.
All that explanatory power is ultimately why I’m suspicious of Orch OR. Reading about it in pop-sci write-ups and the researchers’ own abstracts, I’m reminded of the way I felt about ghosts as a twelve-year-old, about certain Buddhist ideas as a sixteen-year-old, or about Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance as a twenty-four-year-old: almost drunk with their neatness and beauty. Unified theories of everything are tantalizing. But I think all we ever get, all we deserve, are glimpses through the prism. Maybe the laboratories studying Orch OR will show us a face we’ve never seen before. It won’t be the whole light.
Normal-world scale vibrations
Finom put out a live version of “Hungry”
A year out from the tour I did with Sam Evian, I’m reminisce-listening to his 2024 album Plunge
We watched videos of NoMeansNo at the Loft this week
I was a guest on Mike Watt’s Watt from Pedro radio show
I was also a guest with my brother on Wilco (The Podcast), an unofficial and lovely podcast about Wilco
None of Orch OR’s claims are about the transmission of specific language or ideas or meanings from the quantum scale or between beings in our regular world. That’s all baggage we bring to the science 😂
Counter-intuitively, proponents of Orch OR say it rescues free will from determinism. Something about the built-in chaos of quantum physics, versus the predictability of classical physics, provides an opening for free willy behavior. P.S. This paper drops the bonkers term “brain backward time effects.”
As Freud said on his deathbed, “physics, schmizics, so long as you love your mother!”
No. Actually, I just made that up. But I loved reading this, not just as a psychologist young enough and old enough to be considered “mid career,“ but because reading your impressions of yourself in light of these ideas is like reading a younger, more colorful, modern-day, William James!
In any event, in my opinion, the only single unifying theory about everything is that love sits at the center; I know of nothing more parsimonious to explain our existence.
Keep it coming, Spencer!
Great, something else to worry about.