IONS - What is Consciousness? A Conversation with Stuart Hameroff

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Marilyn Schlitz, President /CEO of the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS), interviews Stuart Hameroff, co-founder of the Toward a Science of Consciousness Conference and co-author of the Orch-OR (Orchestrated Objective Reduction) model of human consciousness (with Roger Penrose), for the newest issue of Noetic Now.

What is Consciousness? A Conversation with Stuart Hameroff

by Stuart Hameroff, MD

Ed. Note: In the following dialogue, excerpted and edited from the Institute of Noetic Sciences’ teleseminar series “Essentials of Noetic Science,” IONS President Marilyn Mandala Schlitz talks with Stuart Hameroff, Professor Emeritus, Departments of Anesthesiology and Psychology, and Director for the Center for Consciousness Studies, both at the University of Arizona. The Center sponsors the annual Toward a Science of Consciousness conference, the largest and longest-running event of its kind in the world, which emphasizes rigorous and interdisciplinary approaches to the study of conscious awareness. Hameroff’s theories of the mechanisms of consciousness are starting to spark interest among both scientists and mystics.

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Schlitz: By way of background, tell us how you came to have this deep and abiding fascination with consciousness?

Hameroff: I first got interested when I took a course in college on philosophy of mind. In medical school too, I was always intrigued by the brain-mind problem, how the brain produces conscious experience. I was drawn to neurology, psychiatry, and neurosurgery of the brain. I eventually wound up in anesthesiology—because I liked the lifestyle much better and because the fellow who would be my future chairman told me at the time that if I want to understand consciousness, I should figure out how anesthesia works because “we don’t know.” (Actually, we still don’t know, although I have some ideas about it.) The other reason was my almost-obsession with microtubules, the structures inside cells that form, do mitosis, pull the chromosomes apart, form the structure of cells, and regulate synapses. They seem to me to be like little computers. My future boss told me that an anesthetic depolymerizes these structures. So those were several reasons for me to choose anesthesiology to continue my interest in studying how the brain produces consciousness.

Schlitz: So what is consciousness? How do you answer that?

Hameroff: For me, it’s awareness. Sometimes we get caught up in the terms, and people use them to mean different things—group consciousness, self-consciousness. But I define consciousness as any awareness whatsoever, and that is the hard problem that needs to be explained. It’s still a mystery.

Schlitz: So how do you address the question of those places where we have experience but are not aware of it? For example, does inattentional blindness (not seeing something in plain site) fit your definition?

Hameroff: I would say that is not consciousness. That is cognition; it is subconscious information. Our brains drive all kinds of behaviors and processes that are not conscious. I’ll give you one example. In anesthesiology, when surgeons perform surgery on the spine, we worry that they might do something to the spinal cord. So we monitor brain potentials. Electrophysiologists put electrodes on the brain, on the scalp, and stimulate the legs, the hands, or the eyes to get signals from the brain they can monitor to know whether the spinal cord is intact. And yet, the patients are completely unconscious. That’s an example of the brain doing something, processing information, without consciousness.

We do all kinds of things by autopilot, by habit. You know, when I’m driving to work, I frequently daydream about various things: what my case will be that day, what happened the previous night, a ball game, this or that. So, I’m sort of conscious. I’m not totally conscious of the road as long as everything is going smoothly, but if something happens, whether a car swerves or a horn honks or a light changes, then my consciousness immediately returns to driving. I’m actually driving on autopilot by and large, and I think most people have a similar experience. So behavior and cognition may or may not be conscious. I like the metaphor of an airplane pilot who can press a button to put the plane on autopilot and then go to the bathroom or take a nap or mess with the stewardess while the plane flies perfectly well as long as everything is routine. If something happens, the pilot immediately takes control. I think our brains work the same way. Consciousness can kind of wander around our brain, into memory, into fantasy, into various things, while our nonconscious brain continues driving or walking or even carrying on a conversation.

Schlitz: That brings up the question of the brain and consciousness. Are they equal or similar? How do you distinguish, or not, consciousness from the brain?

Read the whole interview.