ULTIMATE COMPUTING - Quantum Consciousness Studies

Toward Ultimate Computing 11
Figure 1.3: Axoplasmic transport occurs by coordinated activities of microtubule
attached sidearm, contractile proteins (“dynein”) which cooperatively pass
material in a “bucket brigade.” The orchestration mechanism is unknown, but
shown here as the consequence of signaling by “soliton” waves of microtubule
subunit conformational states. By Fred Anderson.
Observation of two, or ten, or thousands of those molecules would not
suggest the Mozart or Madonna that can arise in a collection of more than a
trillion trillion molecules. Other examples of collective phenomena may be seen
in beehives, ant colonies, football teams, governments and various types of
material phase transitions. For example, superconductivity and magnetism are
collective effects which occur in certain metals as their individual atoms come
into alignment. By cooling these metals, thermal fluctuations cease, atoms
become highly aligned, and below a critical temperature totally different
qualitative properties of superconductivity or magnetism emerge.
How might collective phenomena be tied to consciousness Brain neuron
synaptic transmissions are relatively slow at several milliseconds per
computation-they are about 100,000 times slower than a typical computer switch.
Nevertheless vision and language problems can be solved in a few hundred
milliseconds or what would appear to be about 100 serial steps. Artificial
Intelligence (AI) researchers conclude that this computational richness is
accounted for by collective effects of parallelism and rich interconnectedness.
With billions of neurons, and with each neuron connected to up to hundreds of
thousands of other neurons, Al “connectionists” view the brain as a collective
phenomenon of individually stupid neurons. Groups of highly connected neurons
are thought to attain intelligent behavior through properties of feedback and
reverberation. Walter Freeman (1972, 1975, 1983) of the University of California
at Berkeley contends that a “critical mass” of about 100,000 neurons yields
intelligent behavior. However, intelligent behavior occurs within nematode
worms of 1000 cells and 300 neurons, within cytoplasm in single cell organisms
and within single neurons. Individual neurons with tens to hundreds of thousands
of connections cannot be stupid and fulfill their multiple functions, integrate
input/output and modulate synaptic connection strength. Each nerve cell is a
sophisticated information processing system in and of itself! The cytoskeleton
within neurons and all living cells is a parallel connected network which can
utilize its own collective phenomena to organize and process subcellular