SAND18 US — The Geometry of Consciousness

Sir Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff propose that human brains don’t compute but rather think, through a process that incorporates a general relativistic modification to quantum mechanics. Although science is far from a unified theory we can see that these ideas would require the brain to obey certain geometrical constraints. This talk explains current research into the structures within the brain including experiments to test the effect of anesthetics on coherent energy transport in brain microtubules and progress on testing Penrose’s objective reduction (OR) hypothesis using Bose Einstein Condensates. Finally, we put this together into a possible model for a thinking machine that is not a computer that might shed light on the puzzle of consciousness.