Nexus interview with Stuart Hameroff

[Tamrin]

In Jill Niemark’s Nexus interview with Stuart Hameroff, we read:

Q: I’ve come to think of myself as an aspectist, in the tradition of Spinoza. He believed that mind and body were just two aspects of an underlying, absolute reality. How would you classify yourself?

A: I’m a panprotopsychist—whatever gives rise to consciousness is implicit and inherent and exists everywhere in the universe. It’s an irreducible, fundamental feature of the universe like spin or charge. One philosopher who took such a view was Whitehead. He said the precursor of conscious experience is everywhere in the universe, and also that the universe is a process, made up of events rather than things. He viewed consciousness as a sequence of events, occasions of experience, occurring in a wider field of protoconscious experience. Whitehead’s occasions of experience are compatible with and perhaps even equivalent to quantum state reductions, for example Roger Penrose’s OR [objective reduction] events. Here we finally have a connection between philosophy and science. But what’s the wider field of protoconscious experience? Roger’s OR is based on the idea that quantum superpositions are separations at the most basic level of the universe at the Planck scale. So you ask yourself, what is this basic level? What is the universe made of? Even mass is not fundamental according to Einstein, and atoms are mostly empty space as is most of the universe. So what is the universe made of? This argument has been going on since the Greeks. Is there a background fabric, or just an empty void? In the last few decades there’s been a lot of intense work trying to understand the background pattern of the universe. It turns out that as we go down in scale, well below the size of atoms, things are smooth and featureless until we get to the apparent basement level of the universe known as the Planck scale, some 25 orders of magnitude smaller than atoms. At the Planck scale things get coarse and irregular, with a vast amount of information and energy. How can we describe it? String theory has tried, but others for example Lee Smolin argues for spin networks, based on Roger Penrose’s original idea that at this level everything is spin. The universe is made of spiderwebs of spin. I’m oversimplifying it, but the number of possible shapes and edges and spins for each Planck volume, or pixel of reality, is huge, and the number of pixels for example in the volume of our brains is incredibly vast. So the amount of information at the Planck scale is absolutely mind-boggling, and its also nonlocal – that is distributed something like a hologram.

This perspective ties in well with Systems Theory, which I have long favoured (including on this forum) and which was popularised among undergrads in the 1980s by Fritjof Capra in his book, The Turning Point. Such perspectives may often complement intellectual and spiritual enquiries, provided other perspectives are not simply dismissed out of hand. Consider, for instance the seemingly inconsistent perspectives of matter, especially light, as either particles or waves.