Post 56: What the hell is consciousness anyway? Part 5: Orch-OR

Or maybe how does consciousness arise?

I debated how much or how little of this discussion I should post, (or if I should abandon it completely). I am mostly doing it because, one, it does follow almost directly on from the Quantum Mechanics, Quantum Computing, and AI Consciousness series that I just concluded so some of it is fresh, and two, because I ended up having a long-delayed realization about the philosophy of consciousness.

Let’s start with the latter. I realized during this discussion that there are two broad categories theories about consciousness that are in tension. The first is the question “what does it mean to be conscious?”, and the second asks, “how does consciousness come into being?” (I suppose there is a third that asks if consciousness is even real, but we will leave that aside for the moment). These two are at odds because the first asks, how can you know how consciousness arises if you can’t even define it? And the second replies, how can you know what consciousness is if you don’t know how it comes to be?

Orch-OR (Orchestrated Objective Reduction) is a theory that doesn’t try to say exactly what consciousness is, but instead offers a theory of where it comes from. Proposed by physicist Roger Penrose and anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, Orch-OR suggests that quantum events collapsing in microtubules within neurons are the origin of consciousness. (In short: consciousness arises from self-collapsing quantum states inside the brain, driven by quantum gravity and guided by brain structure and activity. This is an objective collapse theory — it rejects the idea that measurement or decoherence causes wave-function collapse.)

I don’t favor this view, but I’m not a physicist or a genius, so take my opinion with a handful of salt, this sounds a bit to me like positing that the soul resides in the penial gland, with about as much evidence.

However, Penrose has a really interesting and hard to fathom reason for thinking this may be so based on Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem. I tried really hard during this conversation to understand the theorem and failed. I'm putting in even the painful parts where I try to puzzle it out in case you get it and can explain it to me.

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Note: The indented text highlighted in grey are my prompts and the un-highlighted text is that of the LLM.