Consciousness in the Universe: the concrete, the abstract, or something in between?

What if consciousness is not something your brain produces, but something woven into the fabric of reality itself?

We end the Paper of the Week, One Week (POWOW), with a blog that brings everything together in one coherent story; in this paper, titled “Consciousness in the universe: a review of the Orch Or theory”, published in 2014, the authors Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose dare to acknowledge the shortcomings of our reason and perception. In doing so, they pose a simple question: What is consciousness?

This question sounds very familiar to another basic one: “What is time?”

We can experience, categorize, and discuss them on and on; what they have in common is that they are irreducible into simpler concepts. A clock can show what time it is, but it has never eluded into what time is. Likewise, neuroscience can reveal remarkable details about how the brain works, or how we interpret its workings, and signalling pathways, without even claiming to have an explanation for what consciousness is. These phenomena seem very close to the bedrock of reality, and they are to be experienced, rather than explained. Nevertheless, it is our reason that insists on explanation; hence, we shall begin with how Penrose and Hameroff came to share their theory on consciousness, the Orch OR, or the Orchestrated Objective Reality.

The three perspectives on consciousness:

A. The concrete or materialist view: The scientific consensus, which is shared with the materialist view, is that consciousness is a product of brain activity, but no one knows how!

B.     The spiritual perspective:  This view acknowledges that our interpretation of the world is very limited and consciousness exists outside the brain; the brain acts as a receiver and interpreter of consciousness. Many indigenous cultures and religions share this view.

C.     The orchestrated objective reality (Orch OR) view:  This view is not much different from the one in B, but with more clarity and evidence on the relation between the object and energy field; they define consciousness as a fundamental feature of nature that biology harnesses.

The authors then proceed to an intriguing argument about how anesthetics can “disable” consciousness without disabling the brain. For decades, researchers assumed anesthetics worked primarily by altering the activity of proteins embedded in neuronal membranes. Hameroff argued that this explanation was incomplete. If consciousness emerges solely from neuronal firing and synaptic communication, then anesthetics should simply disrupt those processes. Instead, they appear to selectively abolish conscious awareness while leaving much of the brain's underlying machinery intact. This led Hameroff to ask a different question: what cellular structures are consistently targeted by anesthetic molecules? The answer repeatedly pointed toward microtubules, cylindrical protein assemblies made of tubulin that form part of the cell's cytoskeleton.

This proposition came after Penrose argument from mathematics, and quantum gravity that consciousness requires a non-computable physical process. Hameroff, an anesthesiologist, proposed microtubules (a polymer of alpha and beta tubulin proteins) as the biological structure where such processes could occur.

Microtubules had traditionally been viewed as structural components, the cell scaffolding and transportation network. Hameroff proposed that they might be doing much more. Because anesthetic molecules bind within hydrophobic pockets of tubulin proteins, he suggested that microtubules could participate in the very processes that generate conscious experience.

For Penrose, microtubules offered an intriguing candidate. In the figure below, taken directly from their paper, they have embedded their theory in the basic neuroscience of the integrate-and-fire system. Neurons receive and integrate input; if the signal crosses a threshold, they produce an output, or the neurons will "fire". This model explains how neurons communicate, but it provides no explanation for how consciousness arises. They propose that the biological player in most proximity to consciousness-related quantum events occurs within microtubules.

They are highly ordered, abundant in neurons, unusually stable, and composed of repeating tubulin units that could support coordinated quantum states. Thus, anesthesia became more than a medical phenomenon; it became a clue. If disrupting microtubules reliably disrupts consciousness, perhaps microtubules are not merely supporting neuronal activity; they could participate in the processes that give rise to conscious awareness.

A simplified view of the Orch OR theory. Neurons receive information, process it, and decide whether to "fire" a signal. Hameroff and Penrose suggest that part of this processing may occur deep inside the neuron within structures called microtubules. These internal networks, together with connections between neighboring neurons, are proposed to help orchestrate the objective reality we share. Figure is from Hameroff and Penrose (2014).

Where Things Get Weird

To this point, the Orch OR theory can be viewed as an unconventional neuroscience hypothesis. Microtubules may process information. Anesthetics may target them. Some processing of cognition occurs within these microtubules in neurons.

However, Penrose was not satisfied with the idea that consciousness could emerge solely from increasingly sophisticated computation. A computer may become faster and more complex, but complexity alone does not explain why anything should be experienced from the inside. Why should information processing produce the feeling of seeing the colour blue, hearing music, or nostalgia?

His argument was radical: consciousness requires a physical process that is fundamentally non-computational.

To understand this, imagine a quantum system existing in multiple possible states simultaneously; a phenomenon known as superposition or, as Don Juan used to call this, “being here and here” (Castaneda, 1987). According to standard quantum mechanics, these possibilities evolve together until a measurement occurs, at which point one outcome becomes reality.

When Don Juan experiences this, it is when he gets thrown into a river by nobody other than his benefactor, Julian Osorio, in a quest for “finding God” or reaching heightened awareness. The unforgiving strong river provides the shock that shifts the perception of Don Juan where he sees himself running alongside the river, while a moment later he is in the river, trying hard not to drown. An astonishing story where being in two places at once is experienced. You can find the full story in the chapter “The Two One-Way Bridges ", p. 225, from the book “The Power of Silence”.

Back to the paper: Penrose suggested that space and time may become unstable when too many quantum possibilities coexist. At a certain threshold, reality is forced to choose. This event is what he called objective reduction (OR).

Hameroff asked a biological question: what if microtubules can orchestrate these quantum events within neurons?

According to Orch OR, consciousness does not emerge simply because neurons fire electrical signals. Rather, moments of conscious awareness correspond to orchestrated reductions of quantum states within microtubules. The brain, in this view, is not merely a computer. It is an organ that organizes quantum events into meaningful experiences. This is where the theory becomes controversial.

Many physicists argue that the brain is far too noisy for delicate quantum states to survive long enough to influence cognition. Others view the proposal as a bold attempt to bridge a gap that conventional neuroscience has yet to close.

Regardless of where one stands, the theory's ambition is difficult to ignore. Penrose and Hameroff are not asking how neurons communicate. They are asking whether consciousness itself is woven into the fundamental fabric of reality.

And that is why this paper continues to fascinate scientists, philosophers, and curious readers more than a decade after its publication.

My thoughts

Whether Orch OR is accepted as the 'correct' view is secondary to the value of the questions it asks. The paper challenges assumptions many of us take for granted: that consciousness is simply computation, that free will is an illusion, or that subjective experience can be reduced entirely to neuronal firing patterns.

Reading Hameroff and Penrose reminded me of Don Juan's "sorcery description of the world" from The Fire From Within (Castaneda, 1984). Although emerging from entirely different traditions, both perspectives challenge the assumption that reality is fully captured by ordinary perception. In Castaneda's work, everyday reality is described as one interpretation among many possible ways of perceiving the world. Similarly, Orch OR asks whether our current scientific understanding is incomplete, and whether consciousness points toward aspects of reality that remain unexplained by conventional models.

I am not suggesting that sorcery and quantum physics are equivalent explanations. Rather, I find it fascinating that both arrive at a similar invitation: to question our certainty about what reality is and how we experience it. As scientists, we are trained to reduce complex phenomena into simpler components. Yet some questions, such as "What is consciousness?" or "What is time?", seem to resist complete reduction. They may already sit close to the bedrock of reality itself.

Whether one agrees with Orch OR or not, Hameroff and Penrose deserve credit for inviting us to explore ideas at the periphery of our perception and at the boundaries of scientific understanding. For that reason alone, this paper is worth reading.

References:

Castaneda C. The Power of Silence: Further Lessons of Don Juan. New York: Simon & Schuster; 1987.

Hameroff S, Penrose R. Consciousness in the universe: A review of the "Orch OR" theory. Physics of Life Reviews. 2014;11:39–78