This Is My Theory of Human Consciousness

Science General Neuroscience
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Consider the entire human brain is entirely made up of one type of neuron, which is a brain cell. The neuron has many output tentacles called axons, like output wiring of a computer. The neuron has many input tentacles called dendrites, like the input wires of a computers. The middle region of the neuron between the axons and dendrites is a fat region called neuron body. As neuronal signals pass along the dendrites down the body, the signal chaotically shoot signals out the axons. If there is little inputs to the dendrites, there is little output down the axons. If there are many inputs to the dendrites at the same time, there will be bigger explosion of the axons outputs, meaning more energy is produced at the output.

The neurons are connected together end-to-end axons to dendrites. Memories are stored in the links between the neurons. Signals transmitted between neurons are sent by the release of protein molecules called neurotransmitters. There is a saying “use it or lose it”, meaning the more you use the memory the stronger is the memory. There are protein guns at the ends of the axons, and they signals the other neurons by shooting protein molecules, neurotransmitters, at the other neurons. Upon the reception of the neurotransmitters, the other neurons accept the signals. The neurotransmitters are received at the other neurons through some protein molecules receivers. The guns, the neurotransmitters, and the receivers are all protein molecules of different types. The more those guns shoot in those “use it or lose it” areas, the more developed those areas will be, and more guns will accumulate there and the memories there will become stronger.

The generalization of consciousness is that thoughts exist as balls of energy of neurons shooting all over the place. They shoot all over the place but the places of highest likelihood of hitting are where the “use it or lose it” connections are at. Each ball of energy contains the main thought and the components of the thought. The main thought could be the thought of such things as a laptop. The laptop has components such as keyboard, screen, memory, and CPU. Everything has components. Every words have components such as letters and meanings. The thoughts and the components are interlinked together, and feeding each other. The identity of the thought is the links to the components. To know or understand an object in the mind you need to know the components of the object in the mind. It’s like to know a word you need to know its definition. Without knowing the definition or some meaning of the word, your memory of the word is very much worthless. A thought of an object in the mind is similar, because it is mainly an ensemble of parts or components. The components are connected together like 3-dimensional DNA. DNAs are like 1-dimensional strings of information. Components can be more than just components but also things like what things happened in the past. For example, number 3 has components such as: it looks like wiggly line and has such shape. It also has a component of it being seen in the past, on a billboard for example. Number 3 is not identified as number 4 because its components in the brain are different than number 4 components in the brain. If both number 3 and number 4 have only the components of them being wiggly lines and them being numbers, then they cannot be identified as different but as the same. That is why having more components reduces confusion. In the brain, they look like components but in reality they are labels. Number 3 is labeled as a wriggly line and labeled with a value of 3. Having more knowledge about the right thing is always better. When reading a book, you would want to think specifically about what is being read or wrong information would be recorded in the brain about what is being read.

Happiness is low or high stable (unreactive, unchanging) energy spread out over large areas in the brain. The result of happiness energy is that you want to stay in one place of happiness for a long time. Pain is unstable high energy localized in one small place. The result of pain energy is that you want to run away from the place causing the pain, or want to kill the enemy causing the pain. The ball of unstable energy spreads out and transforms to create new thoughts such as running away, or killing the enemy, or other things. Sometimes high energy over large can also be pain if the energy is too high to be handled over the area. The area can be ruptured and the energy be identified as pain. Such energy can be identified as unstable, which means reactive. Pain is not localized in a certain neuron but in activities in a bunch of neurons being closed together. Evidence of pain being high activities in a bunch of neurons being closed together: blinding bright light, loud noises, and huge cut on the body. The high energy ball of pain in the brain is like heating up a kettle of water until the kettle top blows off.

Think of memorization in the brain as a process of “carving” or burning in information like the burning of information in a CDROM. Memorization in the brain is a process of creating pathways connecting points between points. For example, you memorize a solution to a problem, and the next time you encounter the problem you just go back the old pathways, and the solution to the problem will be shown to you automatically. As you memorize more, more pathways will be burned and more components will be created. As a pathway is created, the probability moving from one point to another (problem point to solution point) increases if the problem point in encountered. It’s called accessibility between points. It has become more accessible to get from that one point to that another point.

In the brain there are jamming effects of thoughts, which are about bigger ball of energy interfering with smaller ball of energy to shut down the smaller ball of energy. An example is some people having trouble reading book while in a crowd that is constantly making noises. Sound signals enter the brain before the visual signals of the words from the book and causing interference. If you have a good brain, you won’t have such effect of interference. Some people can’t function well because they activate too many things in their mind at the same time when needing to solve a problem. Their brain gets jammed up because of overactivation.

A big ball of energy would be something such as the ego, which is the representation of the self in the brain. The ego is built up since childhood through many things such as sensors activities from the hands, tongues, skins and others. The self identifies the person. A man feels happy seeing a beautiful woman is because of the activation of the ego. That’s high stable energy. Upon seeing the beautiful woman the man’s ego bonds with the visual signals about the woman. The man is now the woman because his ego takes on her ID. A man feel pain when his wife cheats on him. It’s when his ego gets in an unstable high energy state. Such pain proves that pain is not about activating pain receptors such as nociceptors. Nociceptors may cause high energy pain, but I think their activation are not pain themselves. It’s the unstable high energy that is pain. How sounds in a song are organized also shows that pain and happiness are about the stable and unstable energy. If the sounds are organized correctly, the song is pleasant to listen to. When the sounds are not organized correctly, the song is unpleasant to listen to.

The ego has a tendency to bond stably to thoughts of good things. Those things would be things such as food and money. That is why people feel good when they eat good food and have a lot of money. When the ego bonds to thoughts of bad things, it gets to an unstable high energy state of pain. Leaving the ego alone it always bonds naturally to things that benefit the owner of the ego. How a person plan for the future: the person imagine the ego bonding to the good thing and a goal is imagined. As the person sees the world outside not matching the goal inside the brain, an unstable state results. The person then plans out what to do to make the goal meet the world outside.

My 2 Rules of Entertainment: 1-Connect and 2-Unpredictable.
Apply for movies and songs and other things.
1-Connect: Links with expectation in a good way. If you like to see Sci-Fi movies, you would not want to see a Romance movie. Sometimes you want to see yourself positively in a movie. Connect in music is saying one phrase then repeating with changes, then repeating with new changes, and until it feel uncomfortable to repeat. Then make new phrase, and then redo the repeats with this new phrase. They should all connect somehow, like in “abc” to “abd” to “acd” (their similarities are that they start with “a” and they are in groups of 3), and sometimes “abc ad” to “abc ac” to “abc cd”. The result is the electrical movements over large areas. Electrical movements over large area are pleasure. Writing music is similar to writing poetry. Some songs are 100% poetry.
2-Unpredictable: People having knowledge of spoilers of a movie have less desire to see the movie. A repetitive and simple song is boring to listen to. While listening to a repetitive and simple song, a person’s mind plays the song ahead of time over and over again. At the same time the song is heard, the song inside and the song outside the brain collide, causing both to cancel each other out and causing boredom. Unpredictable also means complex. The more complex the song the more stimulation. But a complex song needs to connect internally or chaos will appear, and that causes pain.

Truong-Son Nguyen

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Welcome to the site, you might profit from reading Hameroff (Stuart) and Penrose (Roger), specifically ORCH-OR theory. After getting past some of the cosmological consciousness hand-waving, the base idea is loosely what you seem to be describing above.

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My problem with Penrose and his microtuble notions of consciousness is this: Consciousness is mysterious. The self-organization of microtubles is mysterious. Quantum Mechanics is also mysterious. Therefore, they must all be linked somehow. The equivalent of: “then a miracle occurs”.

Unless there is some solid experiemental evidence to back up these claims, well, you know the old adage about extraordinary claims.

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I agree completely, Penrose confounds the whole thing
but


When you look to Hameroff you get a very interesting and plausible theory. First off, being an anesthesiologist he wondered how people (and animals!) went ‘unconscious’ yet retained cognitive function, parasympathetic nerve functions, etc
 What he proposed was an underlying network constructed from ”tubules that underlies the nervous system. This network, unlike the very slow processing speeds of the main nervous system, operates at orders of magnitude higher speeds and accounts for the binding problem as well as the sensation of qualia. This, of course, happens through the magic of QM and this is where things get weird, get terribly misunderstood, and suffer from a lack of empirical data.

I personally am quite satisfied with what we have so far and feel confident that it will ultimately be validated (better than it currently is). As it stands, some very new research is looking good in this regard, so whet your whistle on this:

Entangled biphoton generation in the myelin sheath

Zefei Liu, Yong-Cong Chen, and Ping Ao
Phys. Rev. E 110, 024402 – Published 2 August 2024

https://journals.aps.org/pre/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevE.110.024402

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There should be a “simple” way to verify his hypothesis.
But before we even go there, it might be instructive first to understand the molecular basis of anaesthesiology. If it is affecting the microtubles, then how precisely?

How do firings propagate through the anaesthetised neuron vs. one that is not? What is going on at the molecular level? Once we start getting some data from that, it will point us to answering more and more questions. I suspect that there will be nothing too special about the eventual conclusion. That is, it will not involve some macro aspect of quantum mechanics. But what we do find will be remarkable in other ways.

Photosynthesis does depend on quantum mechanics, but within the single molecule. It does not entail macro aspects encompassing the entire plant – or the entire leaf, for that matter. I think we will find something similar with microtubles and anaesthesia.

And besides, we should start with the simpler possible explanations first before we even begin to take seriously a more extraordinary hypothesis. Yes, my approach will never make good copy, but it will make for good science. May not make a Bestseller list, but it will bring us closer to understanding how biological conscience and intelligence actually works.

And maybe, just maybe, we may even see true AGI in our lifetimes as a result.

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I’d prefer something more biologically inspired and testable: try this recent view from Nick Lane

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Fluff. Biologically inspired and testable? “He is an original researcher and thinker and a passionate and stylish populariser.”

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Yes, all of those things. And also has tenure, funding, a lab, a team and history of testing these hypothesises. Chat again in a year.

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I’m just going to drop my 2 cents in here.

Claiming that consciousness is “inherently quantum mechanical” is like stating that a hurricane is “inherently quantum mechanical”.

Yes, you can claim that anything is “inherently quantum mechanical”, because the entire universe appears to behave in a manner that is consistent with the laws of quantum mechanics (such as we currently understand them).

What these statements invariably misrepresent, is that the “weirdness” of quantum mechanics is almost never experienced in macroscopic states. By weirdness, I’m referring to concepts such as entanglement, spooky action-at-a-distance, etc. These effects are almost never observed in macroscopic states due to the inherently stochastic nature of quantum mechanics. That means there is a statistically negligible chance that those coherent interactions will survive beyond a few nano-seconds in the natural world (perhaps a few milliseconds or maybe even seconds in a contrived laboratory setting). This is due to the enormous amount of random perturbations these systems are experiencing constantly.

There’s a reason why quantum computing is so difficult and expensive. It’s very hard to keep these desired entangled states stable for long enough to construct a coherent circuit from which useful information can be extracted. The systems have to be cooled to absurd temperatures to prevent random thermal fluctuations from destroying the entangled states.

Biological systems are inherently very messy and noisy. Any useful system that naturally evolved had to be very robust to this noise and still perform its essential role in supporting the persistence of the organism.

So, I believe that it is very unlikely that these quantum mechanical states are somehow essential to consciousness.

That’s my take.

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You’ve taken the words right out of my mouth. That is precisely what I’ve been saying all along.

Which makes what biological systems do all that much more amazing. How do biological systems gives rise to consciousness without invoking the “miracle” of quantum mechanics?

Roger Penrose, please take note.

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Given the nature of this forum (anything goes), here’s my latest refinement.

Brains, to include insects, have two ‘neural networks’.

The main network is the one we see with an optical microscope, the neurons, axons, dendrites, etc
 This network gives rise to behaviors and is made complicated by morphology; e.g., contrast elephant brain with human, neurotransmitters; e.g., hormones and other substances that guide and drive behaviors, and waves; e.g., delta, theta, etc


The second one is implicated by the ”tubules in the axons. This network demonstrates quantum effects, is more photonic than electronic, operates at significantly higher frequencies than the main network and is capable of orders of magnitude faster computations than the main.

The two networks are interlinked, but the main network is more associated with learning and motor control while the second produces awareness and conscious (awake) behavior. The second network solves both the binding problem and the internal and subjective component of sense perceptions arising from stimulation of the senses by phenomena; i.e., qualia.

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I see you identifying a possible structure.
Can you electorate on how this works?

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My knee-jerk response is: I wish. At this juncture the assumption is that there are the two networks and we pretty much know how the main one operates. Of course there are lots of details missing, but in general we understand it.

Not so much for the ”tubules. That all came out of Orch-OR and if a theory was ever convoluted by ridiculous confounders this is it. Penrose, bless his 93 YO heart (and brain) got wrapped up too deeply into the whole ‘cosmic consciousness’ nonsense that he failed to dive deep into the real potential of the theory. Hameroff, a true visionary, did the groundwork, but he too is pretty much over the hill. That said, his 2022 paper, at least in my opinion, explains it best.

Although I personally despise Nagel’s “What is it like to be a bat?” (philosophy has done more to squirrel-up consciousness studies than any other discipline), his point can be applied other places, such as animals where we have good models of their entire cognitive structure, like the honeybee and fruit fly. That is what we are looking at now to try an elucidate some sort of rational mechanism for how it might work. Note that honeybees not only sleep, but they dream as well. This has been confirmed and although they aren’t dreaming of that cute drone buzzing about the hive entrance, their brains are quite active even though they are asleep–the conscious network is dormant.

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One thing that Hameroff is fond of stating is the term “Cartoon Neuron” to describe the current ANN architectural element. He even goes so far as to say what is happening inside the neuron is taboo and no one discusses it and it certainly is not included in standard models. How the network within the network operates is a fertile area for research, but many don’t want to admit, or at least accept conditionally, the existence of it even though it operates at photonic rates; i.e., THz, solves the binding problem and gives a rational explanation for qualia.

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