A few years ago, a team of physicists hunted for flashes of light beneath the Apennine Mountains in Italy, in order to see if human consciousness is the result of gravity.
The fact that they came up empty-handed doesn't mean we're all meat computers with no free will; it makes the quest for a suitable model explaining consciousness far more difficult.
You're not alone if you're not comfortable with no free will. In the 1990s, Roger Penrose and an anesthesiologist named Stuart Hameroff argued that the quantum properties of cellular structures could allow the brain to break free from classical mechanics.
Orchestrated objective reduction is a hypothesis that sits on the fringes of physics and biology, but still provides predictions that can be investigated scientifically.
Catalina Curceanu is a physicist from the Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati in Italy.
The concept of Penrose's and Hameroff's is testable, but it still rests on a mountain of assumptions.
All particles have to be quantified by a measurement in order to be considered a range of possibilities.
Some people think the difference is a collapse of the wave-like haze of maybes into a concrete reality.
The question of why a bunch of possible values should all settle on a single measurement is beguiling.
The idea was championed by Penrose and Lajos Disi in the late 20th century.
It's possible that mass and its pull could be squashing quantum waves.
The time it took for quantum effects to translate into mechanisms that would affect consciousness was calculated by Penrose and Hameroff.
Their model doesn't explain why you chose to read it, but it does show how neuroscience can change from classical operations into something else.
The idea of a collapse has been tested before by Disi himself. The experiment in the Gran Sasso National Laboratory found no sign that the hypothesis was correct.
The team now wants to know how their previous results might affect the Orch OR hypothesis.
At least one interpretation of the hypothesis can now be ruled out, according to their analysis. It's not likely that gravity is tugging at the strings of consciousness because of what we know about quantum physics and constraints imposed by Disi's previous experiments.
It's not in this way.
The Orch OR model's quantum collapse pillar is the first experimental investigation which we hope will be followed by many others.
It's not clear what it would mean if there was proof for Orch OR. It's difficult to study non-computational descriptions of consciousness. Our efforts to find examples of sentience, self-awareness, and free will are challenged by programs that echo human thinking.
The idea that biological systems are too chaotic for delicate quantum behaviors to emerge has been weakened due to the evidence of entanglement.
A flash of inspiration may be all we need to understand the physics of our souls.
The research was published in the journal physics of life reviews.
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