Microtubules the seat of Consciousness

Science and Technology
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They are only skirting the issue.
Did you notice that there was not a single mention of microtubules that actually give ALL cells their particular properties and potentials? They haven’t a clue.

It;s like saying ; look at all thos cables and light switches, When I click the switch the lamp lights up isn’t that remarkable. Let’s color all the big and little cables and see where they come from and where they are going.
But nobody talks about the copper wire that do the actual transport of electrons that power the electrical system!

Where are the microtubules that do all the actual work while they color the outside of the cell and record all the parts of the brain that show some EM activity.

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Do you know what you are looking at here?
100 trillion microtubules conected by 1000 trillion synapses. It is at this nano-scale where the processes occur. They are only looking at the exterior and have no clue as to what’s happening at the interior of neurons.

Each neuron contains hundreds of microtubules doing all the transport of all the intra-cellular and inter-cellular data sharing. It is at the microtubule level that thought happens.

This is why Nobel Laureate Roger Penrose was intrigued by Stuart Hameroff’s proposition that thought happens at some nano-scale quantum level and that every individual cell is in communication with every other cell in living organisms regardless if they have a neural network at all!

What all these researchers are doing is like looking in the sky and taking pictures of the cumulus clouds , without having a clue that clouds are made up from water droplets .

Consciousness emerges from the “EM field” generated by the microtubules inside cells and synaptic gates between neural cells, which transport information over long distances within the body as well as store information in microtubules arranged in specific pyramidal patterns.

It is that EM field that can be photographed and studied but that doesn’t tell anything about exactly what microtubules are involved and how they are interacting.

All cells contain microtubules that allow the cells to store short term memory.
All adjacent individual cells communicate via microtubule pores in their cellular envelope, without need for neurons.
All sensory data is translated and transported over long distances via microtubules in neural axons to the brain
All EM and chemical data and information is processed and stored in memory by microtubules in the brain causing the emergence of experiential differentiation and consciousness and the processing of thoughts.
All muscle action potentials generated in the brain during the process of thinking are being transported back to muscle cells and trigger contraction and elongation in intermediate filaments , the flexible sliding filaments, sister polymers to microtubules.
All cell division is regulated by the microtubule mitotic spindle, without which there would be no cell division and copying of chromosomes, essential to living organisms.

Without this remarkable versatility of microtubular properties and abilities allows complex Eukaryotic organisms, such as humans to exist and function in relationship with their environment.

But this happens at nano scales and we are only recently beginning to study and map networks at that small level. It takes electron-microscopy to even be able to see MT.

But have a look at this chart.

In terms of function, scientists classify neurons into three broad types: sensory, motor, and interneurons.

Each combines several elements of the basic neuron shape.

  • Multipolar neurons. …
  • Unipolar neurons. …
  • Bipolar neurons. …
  • Pyramidal neurons. …
  • Purkinje neurons.

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Purkinje neuron

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Transverse section of a cerebellar folium. (Purkinje cell labeled at center top.)

Everywhere you see branching and connections means that there are thousands of microtubules involved inside each neuron as well as in every cell that contains cytoplasma and cytoskeleton.

Abstract

Purkinje cells are the sole output neurons of the cerebellar cortex and play pivotal roles in coordination, control, and learning of movements. They receive two distinctive excitatory synaptic inputs: weak inputs on long-necked spines of distal dendrites from numerous parallel fibers, the axons of granule cells, and extremely strong inputs on stubby spines of proximal dendrites from single climbing fibers that arise from the inferior olive of the medulla.

Purkinje cells are also innervated by two types of inhibitory interneurons, basket and stellate cells. In this chapter, we review how these microcircuits are organized, maintained, and modified during development.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/neuroscience/purkinje-cell#:

Electrical synapses

Electrical synapses can only excite. These synapses form when two neurons are connected by a gap junction. This gap is much smaller than a chemical synapse and is made up of ion channels that help transmit a positive electrical signal.

Because of the way these signals travel, signals move much faster across electrical synapses than chemical synapses. However, these signals can diminish from one neuron to the next. This makes them less effective at transmitting repeated signals.

What Is a Neuron? Diagrams, Types, Function, and More

I we want to generalize we might be able say that the entire body has a rudimentary form of consciousness, but that the brain has ability to think.

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Well you reinforced my feeling that you believe microtubules are the answer to everything. I don’t buy it, they are part of the symphony.

Dismissing the Allen Institute and their work outright isn’t any way to increase the legitimacy of your convict that microtubules are the answer to everything and all else is incidental, or whatever?

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[quote=“citizenschallengev4, post:62, topic:9472”]
Well you reinforced my feeling that you believe microtubules are the answer to everything. I don’t buy it, they are part of the symphony.

What symphony? When there is a complete symphony orchestra, it can play a symphony. It is one of the “hard facts” Tegmark cited, that the symphony is playing and therefore all the instruments are in place. Adding a violin doesn’t change the tune.

Dismissing the Allen Institute and their work outright isn’t any way to increase the legitimacy of your convict that microtubules are the answer to everything and all else is incidental, or whatever?

I didn’t dismiss the Allen institute. I rearked that with all their research, they never even mentioned microtubules where the action happens.

That is like talking about the lighting system without mentioning the wiring!

This is where David Bohm was so right in observing that science has become so fractured that the right hand does no longer know what the left hand is doing.

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I don’t think anybody is proposing a self-aware intelligence at the most subtle levels of spacetime. But I find the term “dimension” really interesting.

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I see spacetime geometry not as a self-aware, but as a self-ordering “quasi-intelligent” dynamism.

Chaos Theory already hints at this and AFAIK the universe started as a chaotic dynamic condition that began a process of self-ordering as it cooled to form quantum fields from which fundamental particles emerged by a process of probabilistic determinism.

This suggests that certain self-ordering processes organize via predictable orderly “guiding principles”, what science calls “constants” and these constants exhibit a mathematical regularity and processing functions that humans have symbolized and codified into what we have named “mathematical values and processes”.

Some say that maths is a human invention, but as all of our mathematics are based on observation of natural processes the mathematics must have been there all along or we could not have observed them and codified them to begin with . Humans invented the symbolic representations of natural relational values and functions.

The 4 natural forces are not random phenomena, the Table of Elements was an emergent result of the orderly self-organization of relational values (particles) which themselves emerged from chaotic “quantum fields”.

Chaos theory

Chaos theory is an interdisciplinary scientific theory and branch of mathematics focused on underlying patterns and deterministic laws, of dynamical systems, that are highly sensitive to initial conditions, that were once thought to have completely random states of disorder and irregularities.[1]

Chaos theory states that within the apparent randomness of chaotic complex systems, there are underlying patterns, interconnectedness, constant feedback loops, repetition, self-similarity, fractals, and self-organization.[2] The butterfly effect, an underlying principle of chaos, describes how a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state (meaning that there is sensitive dependence on initial conditions).[3] A metaphor for this behavior is that a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can cause a tornado in Texas.[4]

more…

Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff are investigating if the trillions of microtubules in the body and brain are able to create an emergent internal holographic field that the brain can experience as an internal projection (field) inside the brain.

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Here’s another example of the ease with which you replace unknowns with assumptions:

https://alleninstitute.org/search/?q=microtubules

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The original article you cited did not mention microtubules

And note that this discussion of MT was by guest speakers. But even those mentions were about specific biochemical processes and only casually mention the impact on mental states and are wholly inadequate to get a comprehensive understanding of the role of microtubules. As Bohm observed “science has become so specialized that it has become fractured”.

I have seen microtubules described by 4 different names and for each a specialized function. I am trying to pull all these different MT functions together to show the critical part MT play in the eventual emergence of consciousness IN ALL Eukaryotic organisms!

ORCH OR is one of the formal propositions that is being researched by Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff. They believe microtubules may be processing information at quantum levels and that that’s where consciousness arises. Other propositions don’t go that deep. I like the concept of "reducible complexity " all the way down to quantum processes. It resolves the eternal question of evolved creation of complex patterns or creation of complex patterns by a supernatural agency.

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So?

When I read various things that mention ORCH OR it’s not nearly the done deal you like to make it sound. Here’s a quick’n dirty summary from WIKI

Orch OR has been criticized both by physicists[14][40][34][41][42] and neuroscientists[43][44][45] who consider it to be a poor model of brain physiology. Orch OR has also been criticized for lacking explanatory power; the philosopher Patricia Churchland wrote, “Pixie dust in the synapses is about as explanatorily powerful as quantum coherence in the microtubules.”[46]

Decoherence in living organisms[edit]

In 2000 Max Tegmark claimed that any quantum coherent system in the brain would undergo effective wave function collapse due to environmental interaction long before it could influence neural processes (the “warm, wet and noisy” argument, as it was later came to be known).[14] He determined the decoherence timescale of microtubule entanglement at brain temperatures to be on the order of femtoseconds, far too brief for neural processing. Christof Koch and Klaus Hepp also agreed that quantum coherence does not play, or does not need to play any major role in neurophysiology.[15][16] Koch and Hepp concluded that “The empirical demonstration of slowly decoherent and controllable quantum bits in neurons connected by electrical or chemical synapses, or the discovery of an efficient quantum algorithm for computations performed by the brain, would do much to bring these speculations from the ‘far-out’ to the mere ‘very unlikely’.”[15]

In response to Tegmark’s claims, …

It seems to me it resembles String Theory in that there’s a lot that helps explain a lot, still there’s also a lot that doesn’t fit at all, so it’s still in the realm of Informed Speculation.

Is that just another way of saying evolution in reverse. Is there any debate about that? I mean science has done a wonderful of working its way back through most of the steps of the increasing complexity, all the way to the origins of life, where there’s stuff that isn’t alive or dead, but outrageously complex chemistry, all wonderfully explained.

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The is one irrefutable “hard fact” that is a “common denominator” in all Eukaryotic organisms with measurable levels of sensory perception and processes, from plants to single-celled paramecium to complex mammals and everything in between.

The single and only nano-scale variable information processor that they all share is Microtubules.
Think about it ! All other hypothetical proposals bypass this “hard fact” altogether and speak of “neural processes” without a clue as to what that really means…

That is why any article about consciousness that does not address the role microtubules play in this extraordinary phenomenon is useless.

Roger Penrose wrote an entire book on quantum scale consciousness existing in the universe but living organisms (The Emperors New Mind"

The Emperor’s New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds and The Laws of Physics is a 1989 book by the mathematical physicist Sir Roger Penrose.

Penrose argues that human consciousness is non-algorithmic, and thus is not capable of being modeled by a conventional Turing machine, which includes a digital computer. Penrose hypothesizes that quantum mechanics plays an essential role in the understanding of human consciousness. The collapse of the quantum wavefunction is seen as playing an important role in brain function.

Reception

Following the publication of the book, Penrose began to collaborate with Stuart Hameroff on a biological analog to quantum computation involving microtubules, which became the foundation for his subsequent book,
Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness.

Penrose won the Science Book Prize in 1990 for The Emperor’s New Mind.[4]

When Hameroff introduced the role MT play in the body, Penrose was immediately intrigued by the seemingly perfect fit for his hypothesis and began their collaboration.

This excellent video shows what goes on in the brain and the role MT play in all this.

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and this is 2022…

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[quote=“citizenschallengev4, post:68, topic:9472”]
so it’s still in the realm of Informed Speculation.
[/quote] Not really. That microtubules are responsible for cellular and neural communication is not speculative. What is still speculative is exactly how and if that could produce an emergent “awareness” over and above chemical and kinetic reactiveness.

What is not yet known is the entire range of involvement of microtubules in the emergence of consciousness.
The problem is that at th nano-scale things get so small it becomes difficult to identify subtle changes that may be relatively very large at that scale.

MT may be a very simple chemical self-organizing nano-scale “dipolar coil”, but that was responsible for cell division and chromosome duplication in the daughter cell. Think of the number of chromosomes that need to be exactly duplicated !
All this is performed by just 2 related tubulins, self-organized into a natural dynamic coiled dipolar potentiometer capable of the most astounding electrochemical information processing and transportation.

It is very apparent that microtubules were essential to the evolution of ALL Eukaryotic life! They were there from the very beginning and they allowed membrane protected Eukaryote cells to exchange information via nano pores.

Without a doubt, microtubules are the communication network in all living organisms.
Even prokaryotes have a simpler tubulin filament that are responsible for cell formation and intra-cell transportation.

Tubulins are a family of GTPases that are key components of the cytoskeleton in all eukaryotes and are distantly related to the FtsZ GTPase that is involved in cell division in most bacteria and many archaea.

Among prokaryotes, bona fide tubulins have been identified only in bacteria of the genus Prosthecobacter. Mar 29, 2012

  • perhaps a "misssing link?

Microtubules may be 3 billion years old!!!

And if Roger Penrose is interested, we better take notice.
His speculations earned him a Nobel prize.

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Okay, considering their central role and ubiquitousness, it seems only logical that they’d be quite ancient.

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I never say microtubules are in the realm of speculation -
I said Orch OR remains in realm of informed speculation.

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CC, compared to what I have experienced in my lifetime, I am extremely happy to be alive and relatively comfortable . I have basically retired from worldly affairs and only pursue that which actually interests me.

I think that from my participation in a range of discussions on this site alone it is clear that I am not obsessed with microtubules. But they are the only candidate worthy of examining in relation to consciousness.

THERE IS NO ALTERNATE CANDIDATE even as there are several hypotheses on the HOW it all works.

To cite E = Mc^2 is not a Abrahamic mindset. It is axiomatic.

By your rigid standards, you might be accused of having an Abrahamic mindset about Abrahamic mindset… :scream:… :upside_down_face:

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In which relation to consciousness would that be?

I don’t think either of us is a position to judge that.
Especially considering that the work of Mark Solms doesn’t seem to evoke much curiosity for you.

(6.01) Dr. Mark Solms demystifies Chalmers’ “Hard Problem” of Consciousness.

(6.02) The Other Side of Mark Solms PhD, farmer, vintner, humanitarian.

(6.03) Students’ Resource: A representative cross-section of Dr. Mark Solms’ scientific publications.

Oh and nothing Dr. Solms does negates the reality of microtubules or that they play a role in the process of consciousness, it simply adds more of the biological dimensions that’s been overlooked for centuries because they required a level of science and technology that’s only been available in the past couple decades.

I never said that was either.

I’ve gone to lengths trying to make clear that:

Abrahamic Mindset is about

our own relationship with the knowledge we possess.

It’s that simple and focused, no matter how difficult that concept might be to grasp.

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The substrate that generates the “consciousness field” inside the brain.

Especially considering that the work of Mark Solms doesn’t seem to evoke much curiosity for you.

(6.01) Dr. Mark Solms demystifies Chalmers’ “Hard Problem” of Consciousness.
(6.02) The Other Side of Mark Solms PhD, farmer, vintner, humanitarian.

(6.03) Students’ Resource: A representative cross-section of Dr. Mark Solms’ scientific publications.

They are trying to solve the “hard problem” philosophically without even knowing where to start.
It starts with the physics of the brain and takes an anesthesiologist like Hameroff who has studied the physics of the brain to understand how the brain works and when it doesn’t.

As Tegmark suggests to start with “hard facts” instead of the “hard problem”. And there is nothing anywhere near microtubules in relation to information processing.
THERE IS NO MAGIC!

I am very comfortable with my relationship to and limitations of the knowledge I possess

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You’d better learn more about their work before making those kinds of statements.

Yeah what the hell could biologists, medical doctors, neurologists and psychologists working together know about the workings of the brain.

AND WHAT THE HECK DOES THAT MEAN?

Okay, what good is a “consciousness field” in itself?

How’s it operate, and what drives and directs that substrate that generates the “consciousness field” inside the brain?

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I have never heard Solms refer to microtubules in relation to consciousness.

Mark Solms (born 17 July 1961) is a South African psychoanalyst and neuropsychologist, who is known for his discovery of the brain mechanisms of dreaming … Mark Solms - Wikipedia

Stuart Hameroff (anesthesiologist) and Roger Penrose (quantum physicist) ARE collaborating and combining the knowledge of each discipline to examine the microtubule processes that may lead to the “discovery” of the origins of mind and thought.

They are starting with the hard fact that microtubules process the sensory
information that eventually becomes expressed as a cognitive thought in the brain.

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I hope you don’t think you see exterior things as they are in the exterior. You see the representation of exterior things inside your brain. What you perceive as observation of the exterior is a representative field inside your brain.

Remember I showed an area in the field of high power lines and when placing a hundred fluorescent tubes in that field they all light up.

I think consciousness is somewhat similar. THe microtubules in the brain form a network that produces a “field” inside the brain. It is that field inside your brain that you perceive as the exterior reality.

Anil Seth reminds us that the brain can only make a “best guess” as to what is “out there”.

The interesting part is that David Bohm already spoke of the “Holonomic Brain” a long time ago.

Holonomic brain theory

Holonomic brain theory, also known as The Holographic Brain, is a branch of neuroscience investigating the idea that human consciousness is formed by quantum effects in or between brain cells. This is opposed by traditional neuroscience, which investigates the brain’s behavior by looking at patterns of neurons and the surrounding chemistry, and which assumes that any quantum effects will not be significant at this scale. The entire field of quantum consciousness is often criticized as pseudoscience.

This specific theory of quantum consciousness was developed by neuroscientist Karl Pribram initially in collaboration with physicist David Bohm building on the initial theories of holograms originally formulated by Dennis Gabor. It describes human cognition by modeling the brain as a holographic storage network.[1][2] Pribram suggests these processes involve electric oscillations in the brain’s fine-fibered dendritic webs, which are different from the more commonly known action potentials involving axons and synapses.[3][4][5]

These are important statements by experts that cannot be ignored or dismissed, in view of the ongoing research that suggests microtubules do a lot more than was once assumed.

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so are these

Physicist Marcelo Gleiser looks at the pros and cons of current theories
NOVEMBER 28, 2021

In a nutshell, the issue here is that tagging neuronal activity is the easy part of the task. The hard part is understanding how active neurons conspire to create the sense of who we are — that is, translating bioelectrical activity and blood flow into self-awareness. …

Whatever the resolution may be, we still do not know how to avoid the arguments from the Mysterians. The nature of consciousness could be one of those “unknowables” that many people will find very hard to live with. I, for one, embrace it. This unknowability may well be what will rescue what is left of our humanity from the unstoppable mechanization and objectification of modern existence. …

We’re at an impasse, you seem consumed with the tiniest, the rivets, I’m concerned with the human being and the realm` we exist within.

I simply don’t have the time to keep up with this, I googled “microtubules in relation to consciousness” out of about ten papers, which I tried looking at best I could and then ride a word search for “consciousness” interestingly only one particle included the word. All I’m saying with that microtubules are endlessly fascinating and a fundamental aspect of cells and they play an important part in brain cells. … and my Maddy is getting real pissed at me, time for the river walk. Not to mention the chores I’m neglecting.

PS.

Front. Psychol., 30 January 2019 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02714

The Hard Problem of Consciousness and the Free Energy Principle

  • Department of Psychology, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa

Introduction:
This article applies the free energy principle to the hard problem of consciousness. After clarifying some philosophical issues concerning functionalism, it identifies the elemental form of consciousness as affect and locates its physiological mechanism (an extended form of homeostasis) in the upper brainstem. This mechanism is then formalized in terms of free energy minimization (in unpredicted contexts) where decreases and increases in expected uncertainty are felt as pleasure and unpleasure, respectively. Emphasis is placed on the reasons why such existential imperatives feel like something to and for an organism.

I recently published a dense article on this topic (Solms and Friston, 2018)—a sort of preliminary communication—which I would like to expand upon here, in advance of a book-length treatment to be published under the title Consciousness Itself(Solms, in press). Since this is a psychoanalytic journal, I will supplement my argument with cross-references to Freud’s views on these themes. Readers with a mathematical background will benefit from a close reading of Solms and Friston (2018) in conjunction with this paper, which is aimed primarily at a psychologically educated readership.

My argument unfolds over four sections, of unequal length. The first addresses some philosophical issues pertaining to dual-aspect monism in relation to the hard problem. The second reconsiders the anatomical localization of consciousness (the so-called neural correlate of consciousness or NCC) in the cerebral cortex. In consequence, it reconceptualizes the functional roles of the “level” vs. “contents” of consciousness. The third and most important section explains the dual aspects of consciousness (its physiological and psychological manifestations) in formal mechanistic terms, in relation to the imperatives of free energy minimization. The fourth section briefly pursues some implications of this formulation for the cognitive neuroscience of consciousness, in relation to memory consolidation and reconsolidation.

It’s a long article which I’ve only been able to start reading. But it’s quite informative.

later

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I have seen microtubules described by 4 different names and for each a specialized function. I am trying to pull all these different MT functions together to show the critical part MT play in the eventual emergence of consciousness IN ALL Eukaryotic organisms!. .