A Theory of Consciousness: What if the Brain Is a Filter? - Science and Culture Today

Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:For nearly 40 years, scientists have debated whether some aspects of consciousness are non-computational, and therefore, quantum in nature. While regarded as controversial and fringe for decades, evidence hasn’t entirely refuted the theory, and its core ideas are generating more and more attention. Recent studies have provided compelling evidence that quantum processes, with microtubules in neurons serving as a substrate, play a role in human consciousness. The rise of consciousness in humans and all living beings is arguably the greatest wonder of the natural world—and it’s also one of its biggest mysteries. Over millennia, theologians, natural philosophers, and neuroscientists have put forward their own ideas about how this phenomenon arises within our minds, and by the tail end of the 20th century, one of these new theories raised more than a few eyebrows. This interest was warranted for a couple of reasons. First, the person proposing the idea was Roger Penrose, English mathematician and Nobel Laureate. And the second? Well, it involved the most devilishly complex of all scientific fields: Quantum theory.

Archaeologists working at an ancient burial complex in Peru have uncovered remarkable evidence of hairless dogs that lived more than 1,200 years ago, long before the rise of the Inca Empire. The discoveries include naturally mummified remains, unusual skeletal features, and clues about what the animals ate and how they were treated by the people around them. Peruvian hairless dogs are a distinctive Indigenous breed known for their slender bodies, pointed ears, and lack of fur. They frequently appear in pottery created by ancient societies along the Andean coast. Today, a variation of the breed is recognized by the American Kennel Club as the Peruvian Inca Orchid. The dogs are also an important national symbol, having been officially designated part of Peru's cultural heritage in 2000.

Our early Earth was a heavy metal album cover: a molten ball covered in a global lava ocean, spewing lethal gases while being pelted by the flaming space-rocks of our Solar System's violently chaotic afterbirth. Over the next 4.5 billion years of hectic cosmo-geological time, it has settled down a bit, allowing humans, lemurs, and others to emerge. A vision of this hellish ancient reality remains, (hopefully) never to be glimpsed by human eyes: our molten metallic core, blazing about as hotly as the surface of the Sun. But our core constantly sends chemical messengers up through its layers, including the space-borne ingredients of its birth, locked away for about one-third the lifetime of the Universe. This includes the hydrogen that was drawn in from the giant cloud of gas and dust that formed the Sun, which continues to ooze up from the core and turns into water in the mantle and crust – not a splashy-sloshy water, but a water trapped in minerals. Early Earth may have looked something like this.