Elusive Consciousness

Author(s): Narendra Bhandari, Surendrasingh Pokharana, Jitendra B Shah
Publisher: L D Indology Ahmedabad

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reality. Penrose has suggested that such space-time separations are unstable and will reduce, or collapse to one particular state or location at a particular time due to an objective threshold intrinsic to the fine structure of the universe, like infinitesimally tiny soap bubbles bursting one facet or another, shaping and creating a new reality. Penrose also suggests that each OR, or self-collapse essentially results in a moment of conscious experience.
This is in direct contradistinction to the Copenhagen interpretation in which consciousness is outside science, externally causing reduction by observation. In Penrose concept of OR, consciousness IS reduction of a particular type. Thus Penrose OR is the only worldview incorporating consciousness into the universe. Penrose OR differs in another important way from Copenhagen and decoherence in which particular classical states are selected randomly from among superpositioned possibilities. The selections in Penrose OR are not random, but influenced by information embedded in fundamental space-time geometry and graviton like energy level. Partly this model matches the model of consciousness in Jainism where we talk of information being structured in the consciousness. Also Planck's polygons are similar to Pradeshas of space and time as mentioned in Jainism.
Penrose suggests another possibility which avoids the need for multiple universes. Values for physical constants defining our universe may be encoded in the fine structure of the universe itself, along with mathematical truth, Platonic values, and precursors of mass, spin, charge, and consciousness. The roots of consciousness may thus extend to the most basic level of the universe. This concept is therefore very similar to the concept of soul in Jainism where soul (aatman) is assumed to be a fundamental constituent of the Universe and different from matter. Hence a term "Quantum Soul" is coined by Deepak Chopra and Prof. Stuart Hameroff (2011)
6.4. Penrose and Hameroff Model of consciousness developed using Quantum gravity with neurophysiology to explain consciousness at brain level
One of the most popular model these days is that of Roger Penrose and Hameroff, who feel that consciousness (physiological or chetna) must be a quantum phenomenon because neurons are too big to account for consciousness. Inside neurons there is a "cytoskeleton", the structure that holds cells together, whose "microtubules" control the function of synapses. They believe that consciousness(chetna in the present context) is a manifestation of the quantum cytoskeletal state and its interplay between quantum and classical levels of activity. Actually Penrose has developed a hypothesis known as objective reduction, whose
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