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Stuart Hameroff (1947-) Stuart Hameroff (1947-) Stuart Hameroff, a medical doctor specializing in anesthesiology, knew that Van der Waals- London forces in hydrophobic pockets of various neuronal proteins had been proposed as the mechanisms by which anesthetic gases selectively erase consciousness. Anesthetics bind by their own London force attractions with electron clouds of the hydrophobic pocket, presumably impairing normally-occurring London forces governing the protein switching required for consciousness. Biologist Charles Sherrington had speculated in the 1950's that information might be stored in the brain in microtubules, lattices of tubulin dimers. Hameroff decided that the bits of information might be stored in discrete states of tubulin, interacting by dipole-dipole interactions with neighboring tubulin states. These structures are orders of magnitude smaller than the biological cells, providing vast amounts of potential information storage. A hydrophobic pocket in tubulin develops electron resonance rings in the pocket. Single electrons in each ring repel each other, as the net dipole moment of their electron cloud flips under external London force oscillations. Although Hameroff did not provide a specific read-write mechanism, he modeled the tubulin states as cellular automata (these "cells" are the fundamental units of John Conway's "Game of Life") that would need to change states at synchronized time steps, governed by the coherent voltage oscillations. (Although brain wave oscillations are well-known, those observed are at very low frequencies compared to the proposed oscillation in the microtubules - 109/sec.) Each automaton cell interacts with its neighbor cells at discrete, synchronized time steps, the state of each cell at any particular time step determined by its state and its neighbor cell states at the previous time step, and rules governing the interactions. In such ways, using simple neighbor interactions in simple lattice grids, cellular automata might perform complex computations and generate complex patterns. The estimated total information processing in the tubulin of a single neuron is of the same order of magnitude as that for the entire brain, if storage is at the synapses of the neural networks. This surprised (and annoyed) some cognitive scientists, but again, no plausible read/write mechanism was proposed for either computational model. In 1989, Roger Penrose published The Emperor's New Mind, which was followed in 1994 by Shadows of the Mind. There he proposed a solution to the measurement problem in quantum mechanics by extending the standard framework's idea of a random collapse (or reduction) of the wave function with a more "objective" collapse he called "objective reduction" (OR). Objective reduction would terminate the deterministic evolution of the wave function predicted by the Schrödinger equation. (Another scheme to force the collapse was proposed by Ghirardi, Rimini, and Weber.) Penrose initially looked to quantum gravity as the driving force behind OR. Note that the traditional connection between consciousness and the collapse of the wave-function was the result of early work by John von Neumann and Eugene Wigner. They assumed that a conscious observer was needed to make a measurement (producing at least one bit of information). Without an observer, goes their argument, the wave-function would not collapse, leading to paradoxes like Schrödinger's Cat. Many other physicists deny that a conscious observer is necessary for a physical measurement. [See our solution to the measurement problem.] Hameroff and Penrose began working together in the 1990's to develop an "orchestrated" version of objective reduction. The Orch OR Scheme According to Orch OR, the (objective) reduction is not the entirely random process of standard theory, but acts according to some non-computational new physics (see Penrose 1989, 1994). The idea is that consciousness is associated with this (gravitational) OR process, but occurs significantly only when the alternatives are part of some highly organized structure, so that such occurrences of OR occur in an extremely orchestrated form. Only then does a recognizably conscious event take place. On the other hand, we may consider that any individual occurrence of OR would be an element of proto-consciousness. The OR process is considered to occur when quantum superpositions between slightly differing space-times take place, differing from one another by an integrated space-time measure which compares with the fundamental and extremely tiny Planck (4-volume) scale of space-time geometry. Since this is a 4-volume Planck measure, involving both time and space, we find that the time measure would be particularly tiny when the space-difference measure is relatively large (as with Schrödinger's cat), but for extremely tiny space-difference measures, the time measure might be fairly long, such as some significant fraction of a second. We shall be seeing this in more detail shortly, together with its particular relevance to microtubules. In any case, we recognize that the elements of proto-consciousness would be intimately tied in with the most primitive Planck-level ingredients of space-time geometry, these presumed 'ingredients' being taken to be at the absurdly tiny level of 10−35m and 10−43s, a distance and a time some 20 orders of magnitude smaller than those of normal particle-physics scales and their most rapid processes. These scales refer only to the normally extremely tiny differences in space-time geometry between different states in superposition, and OR is deemed to take place when such space-time differences reach the Planck level. Owing to the extreme weakness of gravitational forces as compared with those of the chemical and electric forces of biology, the energy EG is liable to be far smaller than any energy that arises directly from biological processes. However, EG is not to be thought of as being in direct competition with any of the usual biological energies, as it plays a completely different role, supplying a needed energy uncertainty that then allows a choice to be made between the separated space-time geometries. It is the key ingredient of the computation of the reduction time τ. Nevertheless, the extreme weakness of gravity tells us there must be a considerable amount of material involved in the coherent mass displacement between superposed structures in order that τ can be small enough to be playing its necessary role in the relevant OR processes in the brain. These superposed structures should also process information and regulate neuronal physiology. According to Orch OR, microtubules are central to these structures, and some form of biological quantum computation in microtubules (most probably primarily in the more symmetrical A-lattice microtubules) would have to have evolved to provide a subtle yet direct connection to Planck-scale geometry, leading eventually to discrete moments of actual conscious experience. ("Consciousness in the Universe: Neuroscience, Quantum Space-Time Geometry and Orch OR," Journal of Cosmology, 2011, Vol. 14) Microtubules Hameroff and colleagues Travis Craddock and Jack Tuszynski have made a strong case for memory storage in microtubules, quite apart from the claims of the Penrose-Hameroff Orch-OR scheme. Microtubules are tiny, but highly ordered structures that could encode vast amounts of information per neuron. In a 2012 article, Hameroff suggests the Ca2+ - Calmodulin complex CaMKII may encode information in the microtubules. CaMKII is a serine-threonine protein kinase that has been known for years to play a major role in cell signaling and can also function as a molecular switch, staying in an active state long after the bursts of post-synaptic Ca2+ have returned to base levels. CaMKII is implicated in the standard theory of long-term potentiation by the generation of new synapses. It accounts for more than one percent of all the proteins in the brain. Hameroff notes that the geometry of CaMKII - a snow-flake shaped double hexagon of twin hexameric rings - and the diameter - 20nm - make the CaMKII a nice fit with microtubules - 15nm internal diameter and 25nm external (and up to 25 microns in length!). Each monomer is an EF hand motif consisting of two alpha-helices linked by a short "loop region." The helices can each bind two Ca2+ ions, and change their configuration like an index finger and thumb to become an active Ca2+ - Calmodulin complex. Each of the kinase monomers can activate separately, phosphorylating (or not) a substrate protein. So Hameroff points out that the twelve units in the holoenzyme can encode 12 bits of digital information. He says: In this paper we evaluated possible information inputs to microtubules in the context of brain neuronal memory encoding and long-term potentiation (LTP). A key intermediary in LTP involves the hexagonal holoenzyme calcium-calmodulin kinase II. When activated by synaptic calcium influx, the snowflake-shaped CaMKII extends sets of 6 foot-like kinase domains outward, each domain able to phosphorylate a substrate or not (thus convey 1 bit of information). As CaMKII activation represents synaptic information, subsequent phosphorylation by CaMKII of a particular substrate may encode memory, e.g. as ordered arrays of 6 bits (one ‗byte‘). We used molecular modeling to examine feasibility of collective phosphorylation (and thus memory encoding) by CaMKII kinase domains of tubulins in a microtubule lattice. We show, first, complementary electrostatics and mutual attraction between
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