Picture of Roger Penrose
When proposing biological explanations for consciousness, modern philosophers tend to focus on the cellular scale. However, philosopher Roger Penrose goes a step further in his approach. Penrose focuses on the quantum scale of neurons to explain consciousness with his Orchestrated Objective Reduction theory (Orch OR) (Hameroff, 2022).
Penrose proposed Orch OR as a way to explain consciousness. He first proposed this idea during the early 1990s in collaboration with anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff. Penrose believed that consciousness was a phenomenon in which the brain did not "compute" its surroundings, but rather process them using quantum mechanics. According to Orch OR, consciousness originates from quantum processes in the brain orchestrated by microtubules in the brain's neurons (Hameroff, 2022). These processes are essentially quantum computations in which qubits, fundamental units of quantum information, are objectively reduced to a single state that allows for the formation of conscious experiences (Hameroff, 2022). In this way, quantum processes form the basis for consciousness.
Penrose's Orch OR theory has several implications for human life. Most directly, it indicates that our brain does not merely function as a computer in processing our experiences and that how we experience the world we live in may be much more complicated than we originally thought. Additionally, it implies that there may be a degree of objectivity in our conscious experiences of the world due to the involvement of objective reduction, and there also may be a sense of uncertainty in how we will experience the world since the collapse of qubits to a particular state is not guaranteed. Overall, Penrose has proposed a highly controversial but very unique way to explain consciousness.
References:
Hameroff, S. (2022). Orch OR and the Quantum Biology of Consciousness. In S. Gao (Ed.), Consciousness and Quantum Mechanics (p. 0). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197501665.003.0015
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