Is Consciousness More Than Mind Deep?

The Universe in a Quantum Flicker

This post is written as a ‘brain dump’, and a work in progress, it is designed to help understand consciousness. It is based upon years of interest and research and most recently the excellent comments/discussion on my two previous posts concerning Julian Jaynes on consciousness plus Federico Faggin and his experience with the “light” of consciousness. I do not fully express my beliefs yet, although, I do have a deep inner sense of consciousness and will provide my ‘best explanation’ as I work through the biological, universal, and other theories.

Quantum States

The 2020 Nobel prize winner for physics, Sir Roger Penrose has the audacity to suggest that consciousness is not merely a byproduct of complex brain activity, but something deeper, something inscribed in the universe.

He starts his co-authored, fascinating and beautifully written, paper with this delightful position:

“Consciousness implies awareness: subjective, phenomenal experience of internal and external worlds. Consciousness also implies a sense of self, feelings, choice, control of voluntary behavior, memory, thought, language, and (e.g. when we close our eyes, or meditate) internally-generated images and geometric patterns. But what consciousness actually is remains unknown. Our views of reality, of the universe, of ourselves depend on consciousness. Consciousness defines our existence.”

His collaboration with Stuart Hameroff, called Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Orch OR), which in simple terms suggests that consciousness arises from tiny quantum flickers inside the brain’s microtubules, posits that the collapse of quantum states, not arbitrary or observation-dependent but guided by the fine structure of space-time geometry, gives rise to moments of conscious experience, this is borne out whilst under anaesthetics, as evidence suggests anesthetic gases bind in microtubule quantum channels and selectively erase consciousness.

As Hameroff and Penrose put it:

“Consciousness depends on biologically orchestrated coherent quantum processes in collections of microtubules within brain neurons”.

Hameroff’s crucial role was to locate this process in biology: in the brain’s microtubules, whose ordered lattices might sustain coherent quantum states in ways traditional neuroscience had overlooked. The human mind, in this view, is not a passive witness of reality but an active player, its inner flickerings choreographed at the quantum-biological interface.

The Freedom of a Non-Computable Mind

Penrose is most famous as the scientist who proved that our universe contains spacetime singularities. Why does this matter? Because Penrose was never convinced that consciousness could be reduced to computation. His argument from Gödel’s incompleteness theorems was not simply that systems have limits, but that human understanding of mathematical truth, our capacity to “see” that a Gödel sentence is true, cannot be replicated by algorithmic procedures. Understanding, not just calculation, is non-computable.

As Charles Tandy noted,

“Algorithms do not seem to capture human experiences such as red perceptions, sad feelings, creative insights, and our time-asymmetric decisions to struggle for truth, justice, and world betterment”.

John Lucas, drawing on the same logic, called this the “face of freedom”. Freedom, in this account, is not a metaphor but a quality of minds that leap beyond formal rules.

The Biological Counterpoint

The counterpoint comes from biologists who reject quantum speculations altogether. Baars and Edelman argue that consciousness should be explained not at the level of quantum physics but at higher levels of biological organization. For them,

“Consciousness is ‘a difference that makes a difference’ at the level of massive neuronal interactions in the cortico-thalamic system”.

It is a biological strategy, a selectionist triumph honed over hundreds of millions of years, where information integration across massive recurrent networks allows for adaptation and survival. This critique is not romantic but empirical, they insist that the explanatory power lies in biology, not physics. And yet, mapping circuitry does not dissolve the mystery of subjective experience (qualia).

A Debate on Physics and Philosophy

The controversy becomes fiercest when the physics enters. Critics charge that the quantum flickers (Orch OR) hypothesis requires quantum coherence in conditions that are “warm, wet, and noisy,” inhospitable to delicate quantum states. Yet defenders point to evidence that living systems are not chaos but exhibit, as Jumper and Scholes argue,

“massive cooperation across a large range of time and length scales”.

Resonant vibrations in microtubules have been reported that could enable large-scale synchronization of neural activity. Hameroff and Penrose themselves respond that the non-polar “quantum channels” inside microtubules may shield coherence from environmental noise. In this light, the brain may be less a bag of noisy neurons and more a resonant organ tuned across scales of matter.

The philosophical stakes are equally profound. Some, like Tandy, emphasize that Penrose’s “hyperalgorithmic” vision opens the door to subconscious and even super-conscious states.

From another angle, Eastern traditions see in the Orch OR theory a belated recognition of what Vedanta and Buddhism long maintained: consciousness is not derivative but fundamental. Chopra writes that Vedanta claims mind precedes matter, whereas Hameroff and Penrose insist matter births mind; both agree that the two are inseparable. Process philosophers, invoking Whitehead (namely Whitehead’s high level mentality, composed of ‘temporal chains... of intense, coherent and fully conscious occasions), likewise find in Orch OR a scientific expression of an old metaphysical hunch: that reality itself is composed of “occasions of experience”.

Other commentaries stress the risks. As Pino and Di Mauro warn, Orch OR is as ambitious as a theory of everything, placing humanity at the very center of the cosmological scene. Tuszynski points out that current experimental tools, fMRI at millimeter scales and seconds of resolution, cannot reach the nanometer and nanosecond operations Orch OR requires. And yet, Hameroff and Penrose reply that the weakness of gravity, far from disqualifying their model, is precisely what permits quantum uncertainties to persist long enough to influence the brain.

The Orch OR Theory in Detail

To appreciate the full scope of their argument, it’s worth examining its key components. Hameroff and Penrose distinguish between three broad frameworks:

• (A) The materialist view that consciousness emerges from neural complexity.

• (B) The dualist or spiritual view that consciousness exists outside physical law.

• (C) Their Orch OR view: that consciousness is woven into the universe through discrete, non-cognitive, “proto-conscious” quantum events, which are orchestrated by biology to produce meaningful moments.

This tripartite framing places their theory as neither reductionist nor mystical, but as a new category, science that treats consciousness as intrinsic. A central feature of their review is the idea that consciousness unfolds in discrete “moments”. William James called this the “specious present,” and Buddhist traditions long described experience as a sequence of flickers. Hameroff and Penrose connect these to modern neuroscience’s findings of gamma synchrony in EEG, suggesting that Orch OR events, quantum reductions in microtubules, may be the basis of such moments.

Penrose is unequivocal about the Quantum in the brain and neurons, in his book, Shadows of the Mind, he states:

“The chemical forces that control the interactions of atoms and molecules are indeed quantum in origin, and it is largely chemical action that governs the behaviour of the neurotransmitter substances that transfer signals from one neuron to another-across tiny gaps that are called synaptic clefts. Likewise, the action potentials that physically control nerve­ signal transmission itself have an admittedly quantum origin.”

Consciousness, then, is not a continuous stream but a rhythmic series of collapses, each one an act of awareness.

Time Stops Under Anesthesia

Their argument for microtubules as the seat of this activity rests on biology. Microtubules are stable, uniquely organized structures in neurons, forming recursive networks in dendrites capable of vast information processing. As Hameroff, an anesthesiologist, often points out, anesthetics are known to erase consciousness. Penrose and Hameroff state:

“Anesthetic molecules selectively erase consciousness, acting on post-synaptic dendrites and soma, with little or no effects on axonal firing capabilities.”

They proposes they do this by acting specifically on microtubules, providing evidence that these lattices are the actual site of awareness. With billions of tubulins per neuron, their computational potential dwarfs synaptic models of brain function.

Finally, they root their model in the physics of reduction. According to the Diósi–Penrose proposal, quantum superpositions are inherently unstable, collapsing when their mass-energy difference reaches a threshold defined by space-time geometry. Each collapse, they argue, is a “proto-conscious” event: the termination of a quantum computation and the birth of a moment of subjective experience.

Consciousness is not epiphenomenal but causal, linking the structure of the universe directly to the flicker of human awareness.

Why It Matters

What emerges from these disputes is not consensus but a vivid intellectual landscape. On one side, the biologists who emphasize neurons; on another, the physicists who see consciousness as a quantum phenomenon; on yet another, philosophers and mystics who argue it is foundational. Each brings evidence, but each also reveals the limitations of its lens. The “warm, wet, noisy” critique forces quantum theories to sharpen; the quantum flicker (Orch OR) model forces biologists to admit the explanatory poverty of purely classical accounts; the Eastern view forces physicists to reckon with the primacy of subjective experience.

Because our understanding of consciousness shapes how we understand ourselves, this is not an idle metaphysical question. If we are mere computational zombies, then meaning is an illusion. If, however, consciousness is intrinsic to the universe, then our inner lives are not accidents but continuations of cosmic order.

Traditions of meditation appear to exploit the rhythmic “moments” of consciousness described in both Buddhism and neuroscience. Gamma synchrony may be the biological signature of the flickering William James called the “specious present". Seen this way, training attention is not self-help fluff but an experiment in tuning the oscillations of mind, an act of aligning personal well-being with the very physics of awareness.

We are left with a choice. To see consciousness as an epiphenomenon is to accept ourselves as fragile accidents of matter. To see it as fundamental is to recognize our thoughts as events stitched into the cosmos. Between these poles, the only certainty is that the question of consciousness is not a puzzle to be solved and shelved, but a problem to live with, perhaps the central problem of what it means to be human.

Stay curious

Colin

Main Work cited

Stuart Hameroff, Roger Penrose, Consciousness in the universe: A review of the ‘Orch OR’ theory, Physics of Life Reviews, Volume 11, Issue 1, 2014, Pages 39-78, ISSN 1571-0645, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.plrev.2013.08.002.(https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1571064513001188)

A. Demertzi et al. Human consciousness is supported by dynamic complex patterns of brain signal coordination. Sci. Adv.5,eaat7603(2019).DOI:10.1126/sciadv.aat7603

All other links as highlighted in my essay above plus from the appropriate opinions in Physics of Life Reviews, Volume 11, Issue 1, 2014, Pages 79-80, ISSN 1571-0645, https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/physics-of-life-reviews/vol/11/issue/1

Books

Roger Penrose - The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds and the Laws of Physics.

Roger Penrose - Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness

Image 1 from this video of Sir Roger Penrose & Dr. Stuart Hameroff: CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE PHYSICS OF THE BRAIN

Image 2 Orch OR