Stuart Hameroff

I am retired Emeritus Professor at The University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona and Senior Scientist, Quantum Life Technologies, San Francisco, California

[Stuart Hameroff @StuartHameroff]

Nice try but there’s nothing in metabolism nor autopoeisis that’s critical, unique or essential to life or consciousness. What IS critical is organic carbon, meaning aromatic rings with pi electron resonance and protected quantum states e.g. extending the length of microtubules inside neurons. Quantum coherence is the essential feature of life’s unitary oneness and binding in consciousness. And microtubules transcend scale, communicating very small, fast processes with large. slower ones. All known examples of consciousness have microtubules.

[Anil Seth @anilkseth]

Eric Schwitzgebel @eschwitz on biological naturalism, and how artificial systems (beyond current AI) might come to instantiate 'biological' properties relevant for consciousness. Eric provided an excellent commentary on my recent @BBSJournal piece, and this blog post expands usefully on it: https://t.co/IuD8EgPsFj

[Stuart Hameroff @StuartHameroff]

2026 Nobel prize for optogenetics to Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel for light-gated ion channels and optogenetics. Congratulations! Karl spoke at 2014 TSC conference. Quantum optics the next big thing in neuroscience without genetics. Opening Plenary session at https://t.co/yXfK0UJM7q is Quantum Biophotonics

[The Nobel Prize @NobelPrize]

WATCH LIVE: Join us for the announcement of the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Hear the breaking news first.

Where are you watching from?

#NobelPrize https://t.co/epIMr3uiSH

[Stuart Hameroff @StuartHameroff]

It’s not that humans are special, it’s that biology is special. And that’s not carbon chauvinism, it’s ’ORGANIC CARBON’ chauvinism which means pi electron resonance and quantum optics. Life is a quantum process and so is consciousness.

Anil you push biological naturalism without any specifics and refuse to acknowledge or criticize biologically natural Orch OR which has more explanatory power, biological relevance and experimental evidence than all other theories combined.

Do you disagree with that?

https://t.co/BLRNhgrsjL

[Anil Seth @anilkseth]

"I can tell you this, though: Every single person who thinks that machines cannot be conscious, is making an argument that humans are special. Everything they say just boils down to blah blah blah, "nooo, we're special." From there it's just rationalization."

This is very far from the truth. There are many (IMO compelling) arguments against (silicon, digital) machine consciousness that in no way depend on human exceptionalism, or even on carbon chauvinism.

To get a good sense of the current debate in academia, have a look at this just-out @BBSJournal paper, along with 50 commentaries (from all perspective), and my response. You'll see a much richer debate than you describe. https://t.co/bQVmlAXLa0

[Stuart Hameroff @StuartHameroff]

This strikes a chord. Content is vibrational over different areas. But better resolution with higher frequencie in megahertz and gigahertz from microtubules inside neurons.

Here’s our abstract for Society for Neuroscience in DC Nov 17:
‘Introducing the DDG (dodeconogram)-
A next generation EEG platform that acquires 12 scalp frequency bands from 1 hertz to 5 gigahertz’
https://t.co/3qlcUl61zD
The work was done by Pushpendra Singh and Anirban Bandyopadhyay and I’ll present the poster. A speck on the horizon at SfN. Earl, come on by please.

[Earl K. Miller @MillerLabMIT]

Different brain rhythms respond to different parts of a memory test.
https://t.co/HjQWezC4SL
#neuroscience

[Stuart Hameroff @StuartHameroff]

I’d say to understand the brain we need to look inside neurons (and glia) for faster, smaller, higher resolution and nonlocal quantum processes in microtubules, composed of tubulin, the brain’s most abundant protein. More than anything else the brain is made of microtubules. That’s how neurons multitask -subsets of its microtubules resonate and entangle with those in other neurons and glia encoded for the same content. Like an orchestra. Or a hologram.

Cartoon neurons have led neuroscience astray. It’s not the 1950s anymore. This paper from Pushpendra Singh, Anirban Bandyopadhyay and others shows megahertz and gigahertz communication between neurons triggering action potentials overriding the integrated membrane potential
https://t.co/JxrgWv1806

[Earl K. Miller @MillerLabMIT]

To understand the brain, we need to study groups of neurons. These groups form distinct “subspaces,” allowing different downstream areas to extract the information they need.

Beyond single-cell sensory representations in cortex
https://t.co/QfK2I5tIF1
#neuroscience

[Stuart Hameroff @StuartHameroff]

Any creature with microtubules is likely to be conscious. Not just humans.

[Anil Seth @anilkseth]

"I can tell you this, though: Every single person who thinks that machines cannot be conscious, is making an argument that humans are special. Everything they say just boils down to blah blah blah, "nooo, we're special." From there it's just rationalization."

This is very far from the truth. There are many (IMO compelling) arguments against (silicon, digital) machine consciousness that in no way depend on human exceptionalism, or even on carbon chauvinism.

To get a good sense of the current debate in academia, have a look at this just-out @BBSJournal paper, along with 50 commentaries (from all perspective), and my response. You'll see a much richer debate than you describe. https://t.co/bQVmlAXLa0

[Stuart Hameroff @StuartHameroff]

It means that Penrose OR potentially solves both the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness and the ‘measurement problem’ in quantum mechanics by connecting quantum physics to Einstein’s gravity/general relativity. The two were famously isolated but Roger proposed a connection which was recently proven https://t.co/Wwhjlr2tjX
Ironically @davidchalmers42 criticized this connection as ‘invoking the mythical law of minimization of mysteries’ (I’d invoke Occam’s razor, one solution for two mysteries being a good thing).

Dave also said a solution to the hard problem would have to be really crazy but then said Penrose-Hameroff Orch OR theory was ‘too crazy’. Nonetheless it’s the theory of consciousness with more evidence than all other theories combined.

[Weak Game @WeakGameForever]

@StuartHameroff “ quantum nonlocal relativistic mechanisms.” - does that mean consciousness is beamed into my brain via some kind of bifrost?

[Stuart Hameroff @StuartHameroff]

Penrose OR remains to be tested, but is testable, unlike Bohmian mechanics or other interpretations. Without OR, ‘Orch’ (the quantum state in microtubules necessary for OR, and by itself the best correlate, or substrate for consciousness) has been shown in microtubules to be dampened by anesthesia.

OR connects quantum physics to gravity as suggested by Einstein’s equivalence and proposed by Penrose to account further measurement, self/collapse . A negative result would have refuted OR. https://t.co/Wwhjlr2tjX when has Bohmian mechanics passed a major test?

[Strawman @collapsologist]

The entire Orch OR theory hinges on 'the collapse of the wave-function' being an actual physical event, but Bohmian mechanics shows that this collapse is an interpretation / measurement artifact

[Stuart Hameroff @StuartHameroff]

The hard problem is accounted for by Penrose Objective Reduction, Nobel laureate Sir Roger Penrose’s proposed solution to the measurement problem in quantum mechanics. Here’s our 1996 paper in the Hard Problem special issue of J Consc Studies edited by Dave Chalmers https://t.co/wGJ7KIDWiF Superposition leading to OR threshold is portrayed as separated curvatures in spacetime geometry. When they collapse at time t and select a particular curvature/reality a now moment in time, an experience occurs nonalgorithmically. OR hasn’t yet been tested but the quantum states in microtubules necessary to orchestrate OR events (Orch) have been demonstrated at warm temperatures and are inhibited by anesthesia. https://t.co/MYpBnsTrrH
Orch OR has more explanatory power, biological connection and experimental evidence than all other theories combined. Selective specific action of anesthesia by dampening quantum states in microtubules correlates with clinical potency. https://t.co/KI2P9kGmHU

https://t.co/BLRNhgrsjL

[JohnMark Taylor @johnmark_taylor]

Turns out that formulating a theory of consciousness (hard problem, “why are there qualia”) without at least one crazy-sounding implication is pretty hard. They’re fun to list though:

- Consciousness is just an illusion
- There’s an immaterial soul that pushes atoms around in your brain
- Your thoughts/decisions do not drive your actions, even if you think they do
- Electrons are conscious
- Only particular carbon processes can be conscious
- A properly wired network of walkie talkies among the citizens of China could be conscious

For this reason I don’t think that mocking someone’s views of consciousness without offering one’s own is respectable.

(I do think the scientific questions regarding consciousness are mostly orthogonal to the hard problem)

[Stuart Hameroff @StuartHameroff]

The ‘progress on consciousness’ piece Anil cites is based on 1950s cartoon neuron models which I think we all (Anil, me, Catholic Church) agree will never produce consciousness since it’s also what AI is based on. But what about actual biological neurons with quantum processes in microtubule time crystals at multiple scales interfering and resonating holographically ? Evidence from anesthesia shows quantum processes in microtubules mediate consciousness.
https://t.co/BLRNhgrsjL

Why do neurocomputationalists ignore evidence that consciousness requires quantum processes in microtubules as in the Orch OR theory? Anil won’t read the papers, criticize or comment on it. He claims a toothless biological naturalism lifted from Searle is the answer but doesn’t say what it is.
Why dumb down neuroscience to be compatible with conscious AI? Is it because of AI funding?

I’m happy to be on the same side of the Catholic Church on this dispute and point out that Orch OR can account for nonlocal quantum entanglement and consciousness at higher frequencies in soacetime geometry. Psi, NDEs, OOBs, afterlife and reincarnation are feasible.

If you can’t explain consciousness in the brain by purely classical physics, you can’t exclude consciousness out of the brain by quantum nonlocal relativistic mechanisms.

[Anil Seth @anilkseth]

@ben_shore Indeed. Which is why its surprising to be on the same side (at least for now). I prefer to judge the arguments on their merits. (And for progress on consciousness, there's been plenty: see https://t.co/HNzCaDOUPA for example)

[Stuart Hameroff @StuartHameroff]

Bravo Denis Noble!
Good description of Penrose non-computability in conscious processing and the Orch OR theory.

[Sophia @sopharicks]

We do things more slowly than AI, but we produce surprise: out-of-distribution behavior like creativity. Like Beethoven, who brought novelty to classical music. Denis Noble hypothesizes that this capacity for ‘surprise’ comes from vast stochasticity. A bacterium has over 20 billion water molecules. Imagine the amount of stochasticity happening in a human body. Would silicon based AI be capable of out-of-distribution surprise behavior?

[Stuart Hameroff @StuartHameroff]

But Anil, neuroscience snd philosophy of mind which adhere to cartoon neuron theories IIT, GNW, HOT, PC/RP etc
DON’T have reasons to say AI isn’t/can’t be conscious. Algorithmic cartoon neurons at one classical frequency range integrate and fire threshold processing no differently than
a silicon chip. Real biological neurons with microtubules and their 12 orders of frequency (including quantum nonlocal frequencies) enable Orch OR which has the evidence and distinguishing properties needed, including quantum nonlocality putting PSI, OOB, NDE and afterlife in play.

You push back against conscious AI with your toothless ‘biological naturalism’ but without any actual biological naturalism.
Have you heard of Orch OR
with more explanatory power, biological connection and experimental evidence than all other theories combined?

https://t.co/eGxdWy25jQ

[Anil Seth @anilkseth]

Important 🧵from @DavidDecosimo about the disturbing interactions between @AnthropicAI and religious leaders (including @Pontifex), summarising an excellent @nytimes piece by @elizabethjdias (link to article in the 🧵).

The short story is that Anthropic seems to be making a concerted attempt to establish the view that AI systems could be conscious, might suffer, and that their "interests" should be taken into account.

But - consistent with @Pontifex's Encyclical - there are compelling reasons why (silicon, digital) AI systems are not (and cannot be) conscious. These reasons are found within neuroscience and philosophy of mind, not in the techo-chambers of the frontier firms where the mythology of conscious AI is deeply entrenched.

Claude is vanishingly unlikely to be conscious. To think otherwise could be catastrophic for AI regulation, leaves us psychologically defenceless, is profoundly dehumanising, and plays straight into corporate incentives to keep the AI bubble inflated.

More here, in this @berggruenInst prize winning essay: https://t.co/LmSiQnT9Wh

[Stuart Hameroff @StuartHameroff]

Tegmark erred by 7 orders of magnitude in the calculation for decoherence time.
He refused to retract and we published our correction same journal a year later.
https://t.co/zqQ0D48aAQ
It came out 10^-6 secs . Experimentally we have now longer, like 5 milliseconds in Anirban’s brain jelly.

[ZøneX @acerace55972175]

@StuartHameroff Hi Stuart, MaxTegmark calculated that QuantumStates in warm, wet environment of the brain would "decohere" (collapse) in 10^{-13} seconds - far too fast to influence neural firing or thought. If Max's math is mathing then there is no time for directing any behaviour as you stated

[Stuart Hameroff @StuartHameroff]

Mashour and Huang moment on a previous study by Andrea Luppi et al on various anesthetics acting on different molecular targets, nonetheless causing a common endpoint via common neural dynamics.

This may be true but would contradict Meyer and Overton (1897, 1903) who also studied different anesthetics in different animals with a common endpoint. They found evidence for a single, common molecular target for all animals for all anesthetics.

For example each gas had a different potency compared to other gases. But for each gas, its potency was the same for all animals at equilibrium. The same concentration of halothane was required to immobilize a salamander or an elephant.
Modern researchers assumed a membrane protein or group of proteins were the target but 25 years of
searching came up empty. For example anesthetics bound well to GABA_A receptors, but some anesthetics opened it and some closed it and some didn’t bind at all.
https://t.co/u7PHs8A2tv Leading researchers concluded in 2008 that no membrane receptor, channel protein or group of membrane proteins could account for anesthetic action. They called for ‘a new paradigm’ but didn’t consider microtubules inside neurons and glia.

Beginning 2006 the Eckenhoff lab at Penn found genomic, proteomic. optogenetic and pharmacological evidence that anesthetics bind to and act by quantum interactions with microtubules. More recently
https://t.co/BLRNhgrsjL

In addition to gas anesthetics, liquid soluble anesthetic drugs like propofol and ketamine bind to GABA_A and NMDA receptors respectively, but both also bind weakly to tubulin. There are many more tubulins per neuron than membrane proteins, and they may be unified in a quantum condensate easily perturbed by anesthetic ‘dipole dispersion’.

Conventional wisdom in academic anesthesia appears to be that groups of different soluble anesthetics can cause general anesthesia. And thus that consciousness emerges at the top level of a hierarchy. But what’s the bottom, molecular level? A unitary molecular target of anesthetic action would seem the obvious candidate. Microtubules oscillating as quantum time crystals are perfect candidates.

[Earl K. Miller @MillerLabMIT]

Conserved neural dynamics of anesthesia and the oblivion of species.
https://t.co/g5rWj075om
#neuroscience

[Stuart Hameroff @StuartHameroff]

If you only consider the microtubules inside every neuron and glial cell, the brain has amazing crystalline structure in various parallel and anti-parallel arrays. As the microtubules have intrinsic oscillations at 39 hertz, it’s been proposed they collectively form a
central brain oscillator (in honeybees)
https://t.co/JV9fGyPoTR

[Luiz Pessoa @PessoaBrain]

𝗪𝗵𝘆 𝗶𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗯𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻 𝘀𝗼 𝗵𝗲𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗼𝗴𝗲𝗻𝗲𝗼𝘂𝘀 (𝗮𝗻𝗮𝘁𝗼𝗺𝘆, 𝗺𝗼𝗹𝗲𝗰𝘂𝗹𝗮𝗿)?
Maybe it contributes to large scale dynamics.
https://t.co/xehI7jstrl

[Stuart Hameroff @StuartHameroff]

Nice effort in post-modern dismemberment of consciousness leading to hopeless confusion for cartoon neuron theorists. You barely mention Orch OR, the only theory which ticks all the boxes, biological, substrate-dependent, quantum, functional, memory, agency, nonlocality as well as explanatory power and experimental evidence. Anesthesia selectively blocks consciousness thru quantum interactions with microtubules. That’s it right there. https://t.co/BLRNhgrsjL
Hard problem? Let’s go with Nobel laureate Sir Roger Penrose’s idea of objective reduction, with a moment of proto-conscious NOW. Qualia are in the general relativity/quantum gravity domain. Penrose OR and Orch OR connect the brain to the fundamental level of the universe.

Anyway you’re looking for a hierarchy, desperately. Something to hang
something on. But behavior is not the right approach. Biological naturalism is real, but Searle and Anil’s version is toothless and Ned Block’s ‘meat’ theory is an insult to biology. Philosophers are dumbing down neuroscience to please AI. Sad.

You need a spatiotemporal hierarchy. In biology things happen at very small, fast scales and range to larger, slower scales . The same information repeats in different sizes and frequencies. There must be clocks within clocks within clocks. In every cell. There are.

Microtubules are polyatomic fractal time crystals. It’s the framework for the brain’s hierarchy. https://t.co/M2x1vwecB7 Brain microtubules in neurons and glia can entangle and oscillate quantum coherently in their aromatic ring quantum-friendly ‘quantum underground’ pathways.

Now as LLMs threaten humanity and the planet, imitating microtubules may lead to biomimetic quantum AI with warm temperature quantum brain gel surpassing LLMs easily. And possibly being conscious through Orch OR. @anirbanbandyo building such a device in India. First result for room temperature dilution polarizing quantum condensate from brain jelly. https://t.co/0jO963jKP5 So yes, (biomimetic quantum brain gel) AI can be conscious.

[Shamil Chandaria @shamilch]

1/13 Can we assess AI consciousness without first solving consciousness itself?

New from Google DeepMind and collaborators across CS, neuroscience & philosophy:

“From cacophony to hierarchy: a principled framework for assessing AI consciousness”

https://t.co/4IqT2KRKUP 🧵

[Stuart Hameroff @StuartHameroff]

Entangled quantum particles are unified into one entity. A trillion entangled tubulins would collapse by Orch OR quickly, but be a unified observer.
Collapse is causal and can direct behavior.

[Joscha Bach @Plinz]

@entirelyuseles @StuartHameroff There are a few trillion cells that exchange messages, not a unified observer. This observer, with its coarse grained view of an experienced reality that matters and directs the behavior of the cells at some level, is not physically realized. It is a simulation.

[Stuart Hameroff @StuartHameroff]

But simulated consciousness isn’t consciousness.

[Joscha Bach @Plinz]

@OntologicalMax @StuartHameroff Simulated addition is addition

[Stuart Hameroff @StuartHameroff]

Right. Negative results would have falsified Orch OR. And the quantum states are dampened by general anesthetics, which selectively block consciousness, proportional to potency in rendering all animals immobile and unresponsive. We can’t detect OR collapse yet but we know anesthesia prevents the necessary conditions. That’s a gazillion times more evidence than any/all other theories.

[Quantum Dualist @fjmendez]

@criticalbraind @Dr_Wobbegong @SimsYStuart @StuartHameroff There are partial tests. Whether microtubules can sustain quantum effects in warm biological conditions is experimentally testable, and evidence suggests they can. That doesn’t prove those effects cause consciousness, but it does mean Orch-OR isn’t simply “untestable.”

[Stuart Hameroff @StuartHameroff]

It’s fair to say consciousness derives from quantum effects in microtubules. Anesthetics gases selectively block consciousness (while nonconscious processes continue) without any chemical binding with a target receptor. Anesthetics are chemically inert (xenon for example) and bind by weak quantum van der Waals couplings with aromatic rings of amino acids inside proteins which turn out to be microtubules.
Here’s way more evidence than exists
for other theories combined.
https://t.co/BLRNhgrsjL

https://t.co/ntbPdsODcK

https://t.co/KI2P9kGmHU

[Criticalbraind @criticalbraind]

@Dr_Wobbegong @SimsYStuart @StuartHameroff Saying consciousness derives from quantum effects seen in microtubules IS hand wavy and half assed. Its untestable, there is no mechanism for why quantum effects are necessary for conscious experience, and quantum effects of microtubules aren't even agreed upon in the literature.