Consciousness: refuting Penrose Hammeroff theory (General)

by David Turell , Monday, June 13, 2022, 20:07 (684 days ago) @ David Turell

An expermental gravity quantum study eliminates it:

https://phys.org/news/2022-06-collapsing-theory-quantum-consciousness.html

"The origin of consciousness is one of the greatest mysteries of science. One proposed solution, first suggested by Nobel Laureate and Oxford mathematician Roger Penrose and anesthesiologist Stuart Hammeroff, at Arizona State University, in Tucson, attributes consciousness to quantum computations in the brain. This in turn hinges on the notion that gravity could play a role in how quantum effects disappear, or "collapse." But a series of experiments in a lab deep under the Gran Sasso mountains, in Italy, has failed to find evidence in support of a gravity-related quantum collapse model, undermining the feasibility of this explanation for consciousness.

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"'What I loved about this theory was that it is in principle testable and I decided to search for evidence that might help confirm or falsify it."

"At the heart of the theory is the idea that gravity is related to quantum wavefunction collapse and that this collapse is faster in systems with more mass. This concept was developed in a number of models by various physicists in the 1980s. One of those was Lajos Diósi, at the Wigner Research Center for Physics and at the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary, who has co-authored the new paper with Curceanu, Maaneli Derakhshani of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, Matthias Laubenstein also at INFN, and Kristian Piscicchia of CREF and INFN. Penrose independently approached this idea a few years later and it became the core of his consciousness theory with Hammeroff.

"The two theories are often referred to by the umbrella term, the "Diósi-Penrose theory." But behind the joint name there is an important difference, notes Curceanu. Diósi's approach predicts that collapse would be accompanied by the spontaneous emission of a small amount of radiation, just large enough to be detected by cutting edge experiments.

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"After running the experiment for two months the team did not measure spontaneous radiation signals, constraining the feasibility of gravity-related collapse. In 2020, the team reported in Nature Physics that their negative result had helped them rule out the simplest version of the Diósi-Penrose model.

"In their new paper they have explicitly examined the repercussions of their finding for Penrose and Hammeroff's Orch OR theory of consciousness. After reanalyzing the most plausible scenarios set out by Hammeroff and Penrose, in light of their recent experimental constraints on quantum collapse, they were led to conclude that almost none of the scenarios are plausible. "This is the first experimental investigation of the gravity-related quantum collapse pillar of the Orch OR consciousness model, which we hope will be followed by many others," says Curceanu. "I am very proud of our achievement.'"

Comment: this paper rules out a theory, which is what studies like this do. However, findings like the 410,000-year Cambrian/Ediacaran will stand until/or if another study refutes their method. The method they used is well-established. dhw hopes in vain.