Synopsis of the article:

Consciousness in the universe. A review of the Orch OR theory

By Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose
The eminent British scientist Roger Penrose, working in Oxford, and the American
anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, professor at the University of Arizona have
developed a tentative theory of consciousness that has raised much interest called
Orchestrated Objective Reduction theory, (Orch OR theory). This paper is the most
recent, technical extensive and detailed account of their theory.
The Orch OR theory studies the hypothesis that consciousness arises from quantum
effects in certain protein polymers called microtubules located inside the brains
neurons. These effects would control neuronal firings. According to Penroses ideas,
the quantum mechanical collapse of the wave function is an actual phenomenon
triggered by the gravitational interaction. Generically, the collapse of the wave
function happens spontaneously and in a disordered manner, anytime a certain
threshold of gravitational potential energy is attained. In the brain, this collapse can
happen in an orchestrated manner over macroscopic scales. In other words, the
brain could contain structure capable of controlling and making use of the
wave function collapse mechanism.
There are two distinct remarkable aspects of this theory. The first is that it explores a
concrete possibility of the effect of quantum mechanics on the brain. The second is
more wide: Hameroff and Penrose present this theory as an alternative to the
interpretation of consciousness as a large scale phenomenon that emerges from
complex computation among brain neurons, computation whose currency is seen as
neuronal firings (spikes) and synaptic transmissions alone, sometime equated, by a
loose analogy, to the binary bits in digital computing. Instead, in Hameroffs words
Consciousness is more like music than computation.
The underlying idea, detailed in the paper, is that consciousness is a physical
phenomenon, but physics has a wider scope than what it appears in its most
reductive and mechanistic interpretation; in particular, the physical world can include
a diffuse proto-consciousness, from which the more complex forms of animal and
human consciousness can emerge. More precisely, in their words: Consciousness
results from discrete physical events; such events have always existed in the
universe as non-cognitive, proto-conscious events, these acting as part of precise
physical laws not yet fully understood.
Penrose and Hameroff present this as a third alternative with respect to the
conventional alternative between: (A) Science/Materialism, with consciousness
emerging from known physics and having no distinctive role. (B) Dualism/Spirituality,
with consciousness being radically distinct than the rest of the natural world, and
outside the scope of science.
The hypothesis that Penrose and Hameroff explore in detail in the paper is that the
microtubules in the brain exploit a manifestation of such a proto-consciousness in
order to ground the formation of human consciousness.