Speaker 1: Hello, dear friends, Welcome to the Gods of View podcast.
Speaker 1: I am your host, Trevor Morale is backup systems are good,
Speaker 1: forecasts are optimistic. We've moved on, We've grown. The hate
Speaker 1: mail is no longer top of mind. Ooben ounce back. No,
Speaker 1: it's not you, guys. You could tell. You could tell
Speaker 1: what I was wanting. I was sharing the hate mail
Speaker 1: to elicit a compensatory complimentary email chain and one of
Speaker 1: you listened. One of you listened, So thank you. I
Speaker 1: feel much better, much appreciated. I particularly like this in
Speaker 1: the email from our dear listener. You should be a
Speaker 1: guest on Jesse Michael's podcast or Matt Beal's or dare
Speaker 1: I say rogans into that? I say, from your lips
Speaker 1: to God's ears, my friend put it out there, send
Speaker 1: out those vibrations. I'd be really nervous to do something
Speaker 1: like that because I'd probably lose my job. But you know,
Speaker 1: if you get on Rogan, it's probably like okay to
Speaker 1: lose your job. You know, you just got to have
Speaker 1: lots of books to sell or something by the time
Speaker 1: you get to Rogan, because yeah, that would be an
Speaker 1: immediate job loss for me, unless I went on there
Speaker 1: and did my best to not be interesting and just
Speaker 1: talked about my actual research and stuff. But yeah, that
Speaker 1: would be an immediate termination. And here's the thing. I've
Speaker 1: already been fired once for thought crime. I'd hate to
Speaker 1: do it again anyway. But yes, that'd be great, that'd
Speaker 1: be fun. The only thing about Jesse Michaels if I'm
Speaker 1: I don't want to slander anybody, but saying he like
Speaker 1: a multi millionaire investor in Peter Tele's venture capital fund,
Speaker 1: the great evil Peter Til No, I don't know is
Speaker 1: he evil? He? I mean he he owns an evil company?
Speaker 1: Is that true? Am I making this up? Jesse Michael's
Speaker 1: investor Teal Capital? Well Google pre wrote it, so oh yeah,
Speaker 1: he's a He's a big time He's a big time
Speaker 1: Peter Teal venture capital guy. So I don't know it
Speaker 1: just I always feel a little a little funny when
Speaker 1: the like cool, open minded youngster is a multi millionaire
Speaker 1: venture capitalist invested with Peter Teel. So I think I've
Speaker 1: already just doomed my invite to the Jesse Michaels Show.
Speaker 1: But I could be wrong. Maybe this is overblown, Maybe
Speaker 1: it doesn't matter. It's kind of a bummer though, Like
Speaker 1: it's hard to just be a regular guy in this world,
Speaker 1: you know, like in this world where everyone's an actor
Speaker 1: and everything is a stage, it's difficult to just be
Speaker 1: a regular guy. And right now, I'm still very firmly
Speaker 1: a regular guy, and I kind of like it. I
Speaker 1: kind of like that. You know, this is not this
Speaker 1: show is not huge. Do I mean that? Do I
Speaker 1: mean that? I gotta think about that. There's a middle ground,
Speaker 1: right there's a dangerous middle zone. Like I'm safe here.
Speaker 1: I'm safe here with very few listeners. And I would
Speaker 1: be safe if I had a million listeners, because that'd
Speaker 1: be financially viable. But everything in between the three hundred
Speaker 1: listeners I have now and the million listeners I would
Speaker 1: need for financial independence is nothing but danger. That's the
Speaker 1: danger zone. That's the loser job zone. That's to become
Speaker 1: unhireable zone. So you gotta be careful. Anyway, I've got
Speaker 1: a pretty cool topic for you all today. I think
Speaker 1: I'm a nervous wreck, you guys. I never ask for guests,
Speaker 1: and I've started asking for guests. I asked on a
Speaker 1: big forum online where people were like kind of science
Speaker 1: minded but open minded you know, and that's how I
Speaker 1: got paired up with that paleontologist a couple episodes ago,
Speaker 1: who I thought was very generous with this time, much appreciated,
Speaker 1: and I emailed this guy directly because I'm a big
Speaker 1: fan of the way he's set up experiments to test
Speaker 1: theories and consciousness, particularly orchestrated objective reduction, which is I
Speaker 1: still have a hard time wrapping my head around. But
Speaker 1: it has something to do with Roger Penrose's ideas and
Speaker 1: Stewart Hammeroff's ideas that conscious experience subjective experience is a
Speaker 1: product somehow of the collapse of quantum wave functions within
Speaker 1: our mind. And you know, it's kind of tough to
Speaker 1: understand what that means, except for the fact that Stuart
Speaker 1: Hammeroff and antithesiologists has sort of put forward a location
Speaker 1: for this, which is the microtubule. And of course this
Speaker 1: was sort of dismissed because for a long time we've
Speaker 1: assumed that quantum activity cannot occur in a warm, wet,
Speaker 1: and noisy environment like our mind. You know, our quantum computers.
Speaker 1: We cool them down to nearly absolute zero. But it
Speaker 1: turns out we may have been wrong about that, as
Speaker 1: is often the case, we end up being wrong about stuff,
Speaker 1: and microtubules are very small, so it's difficult to study them.
Speaker 1: And Mike Weist, the guy who I'm talking about right now,
Speaker 1: he designed a really interesting study to do just that.
Speaker 1: And so I emailed him said hey, would you come
Speaker 1: on the show, And I expected never to hear back
Speaker 1: from him, and he said yes. So I have an
Speaker 1: urgent need. I'm putting out the all Points bulletin. This
Speaker 1: is a call to action, a call to arms. Fall
Speaker 1: in attention, fall in at attention listeners of the Gods
Speaker 1: I View podcast. I'm going to play an interview he
Speaker 1: did to just get us in the right headspace for
Speaker 1: this topic. This is big, this is uncharted territory for
Speaker 1: the Gods I View podcast. We're talking to real people,
Speaker 1: real people of import and we need to have our
Speaker 1: wits about us to navigate these treacherous waters. And so
Speaker 1: what I would like is some listener questions. I think
Speaker 1: that'd be pretty cool to go on a show as
Speaker 1: a guest and already have listener questions ready shows a
Speaker 1: level of engagement with the topic, which I think is
Speaker 1: pretty special. So we're going to listen to this video
Speaker 1: and if you have a question, pop into your mind,
Speaker 1: jot it down, send it to me. God's I view
Speaker 1: book at gmail dot com, and I will ask the
Speaker 1: man himself when I speak to him next week. Unless
Speaker 1: he listens to the show and decides to cancel, that's
Speaker 1: always possible, But as of right now, we're on, So
Speaker 1: let's go.
Speaker 2: What I'm going to be suggesting is that microtubules, and
Speaker 2: I'll tell you more about those, but they are literal
Speaker 2: tubes made out of protein that are inside all of ourselves,
Speaker 2: including our nerve cells. They have special roles and special
Speaker 2: organization and special accessory proteins in neurons in brain cells
Speaker 2: as compared to other parts of the body, and so
Speaker 2: I have a bit of Well, the hypothesis on the.
Speaker 3: Table is that our consciousness.
Speaker 2: Is a property of vibrations of these microtubules, of the dipole,
Speaker 2: the electric dipoles, that they're made out of a collective
Speaker 2: vibration of the microtubules in our brain cells. The hypothesis
Speaker 2: is that is the the physical substrate of our consciousness.
Speaker 1: All right, big claim, big claim that the audio is
Speaker 1: kind of bad for some reason on this YouTube video,
Speaker 1: so sorry for all the background ers. Although my computer
Speaker 1: does a pretty good job filtering stuff out. Sometimes it
Speaker 1: sounds bad in my headphones and good in real life.
Speaker 1: So anyway to the claim is this structure, this kind
Speaker 1: of ubiquitous structure, highly evolutionary conserved structure, meaning it's in
Speaker 1: all cells, human cells, shark cells, plant cells, protozoa. They
Speaker 1: all have microtubules, and microtubules we kind of assumed were
Speaker 1: very important. They seemed like they were sort of spokes
Speaker 1: on a bicycle wheel radiating out from the cell center
Speaker 1: called the centrosome. And there is these little cool you
Speaker 1: can watch animations of it online. These little cool is
Speaker 1: it canesan and dining proteins that would walk towards the
Speaker 1: cell center or away from carrying luggage, carrying vesicles, and
Speaker 1: so this is how things move around in the cell.
Speaker 1: This is something that sort of missed in like high
Speaker 1: school biology.
Speaker 3: One on one.
Speaker 1: You have all these structures and it's like, well, okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: but how does stuff get around? And this is how
Speaker 1: there's this sort of intracellular high way system railroad system
Speaker 1: tracks that motor proteins little engines pull train cars around.
Speaker 1: It's really cool. I mean, it is so cool, but
Speaker 1: it's still that's kind of a basic, you know, very
Speaker 1: mundane thing, railroad tracks, right, but they also do some
Speaker 1: other stuff. They also organize the cell's genetic material during mitosis,
Speaker 1: and they split your genome in half. Well, you make
Speaker 1: a copy of it first, but so your your cell
Speaker 1: copies your DNA, so you have two copies of everything,
Speaker 1: and the centrisome split it in half in reel in
Speaker 1: these sister chromatids or the the you know, the new chromosomes,
Speaker 1: the daughter chromosomes, sorry, two opposite poles of the cell,
Speaker 1: and then they push the cells apart until they split
Speaker 1: in half. So it's actually the centrisomes that are like
Speaker 1: key and foundational to cellular division and replication mitosis. So
Speaker 1: that's kind of interesting right. Well now Mike Weist and
Speaker 1: others are proposing that no, no, no, as they do
Speaker 1: much more than that. You know, these things, these structures
Speaker 1: are made of these little tubulent subunits that are polar,
Speaker 1: meaning they have the two sides of the molecule have
Speaker 1: a charge. There's an electrical gradient to cross them, and
Speaker 1: they resonate, they flip back and forth, and so the
Speaker 1: idea is that somehow this resonant frequency is responsible for
Speaker 1: our inner world, for subjective experience. It's fantastical, but they
Speaker 1: do some really good research. Now I'm still sort of
Speaker 1: stuck the same place I'm stuck with all explanations of consciousness,
Speaker 1: which is like, Okay, this is all very cool, but
Speaker 1: it's I still don't really understand, and maybe it's my
Speaker 1: own issue, but I still don't understand how this process
Speaker 1: leads to the subject active experience, like the feeling that
Speaker 1: I'm in my head looking out listening thinking how does
Speaker 1: this little resonance lead to that? And Mike does a
Speaker 1: pretty good job, you know, doing the best any human
Speaker 1: could really of teasing that out. So let's listen.
Speaker 2: And aside from the evidence I'm gonna talk about here,
Speaker 2: this is also kind of plausible because in a biological
Speaker 2: or evolutionary sense, because from the very beginning of life
Speaker 2: from this in single celled organisms, microtubules are already playing
Speaker 2: a very dynamic role integrating sensory information and coordinating movement.
Speaker 2: So it's microtubules that are inside the philipodia and scillia
Speaker 2: and various kinds of legs that single celled organisms have
Speaker 2: and are participating with other parts of the cytoskeleton in
Speaker 2: actually swimming and crawling and so on. It's microtubules. One
Speaker 2: of my slides is about how it.
Speaker 1: It is kind of cool that the first instruments of
Speaker 1: moving and interacting with the environment were brought about by microtubules.
Speaker 1: You know, the cilia, the flagellum, the things that move
Speaker 1: around on cells that allow them to walk around and explore.
Speaker 1: Those microtubules. I think there's something pretty profound about that.
Speaker 1: You don't think You don't think of a little hair
Speaker 1: that can move and make you swim as being like
Speaker 1: this foundational thing about existence. But it is the ability
Speaker 1: to go out into the world as a little cell,
Speaker 1: you know, and have goals, find food, evade danger, like
Speaker 1: this is this is it? This is the first stirrings
Speaker 1: of life, right, it's pretty It's pretty cool.
Speaker 2: The microtubules that coordinate or choreograph the beautiful dance of
Speaker 2: the chromosomes during mitosis. So in the middle are the
Speaker 2: chromosomes being pulled apart. What's pulling them apart are microtubules,
Speaker 2: and what's coordinating all that is the so called microtubule
Speaker 2: organizing center, which is also made out of microtubules. You've
Speaker 2: probably heard that they function like railroad tracks for little
Speaker 2: munchkins that carry proteins to different parts of the cell.
Speaker 2: There is even a series of papers in which Gunter
Speaker 2: Albrecht Bueler shows them some really nice experiments that in
Speaker 2: some single celled organisms, microtubules appear to be detecting electromagnetic
Speaker 2: radiation infra red light and not only detecting it, but
Speaker 2: detecting what direction it's coming from, so that the cell
Speaker 2: can orient itself with respect to that. So, you know,
Speaker 2: they act like little eyes and little nerves inside single
Speaker 2: cells and kind of like muscles as well. So they
Speaker 2: kind of do the whole the whole business of life
Speaker 2: aside from aside from the replication, and so yeah, I
Speaker 2: use this slide to stand for a whole range of
Speaker 2: phenomena showing that although they are called part of the
Speaker 2: cytoskeleton and they're stiff and they have a function like bones,
Speaker 2: they're not just bones for the cell. They're not just
Speaker 2: tent poles holding up the cell. They have many functions.
Speaker 2: And so this is this quantum consciousness hypothesis is.
Speaker 3: Is tacking onto that, and it sort of.
Speaker 2: Makes sense of the continuity between life and consciousness that
Speaker 2: has been that's starting to be noted by neuroscientists.
Speaker 1: It's really a profound point. Yes, I'm sorry, yeah, commercial anyway,
Speaker 1: So it's gonna be it's gonna be interesting to see
Speaker 1: what we end up talking about.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 1: I have found that all scientists, especially experimentalists like doctor Weist,
Speaker 1: they're pretty reluctant to speculate. And this show is like,
Speaker 1: that's all I want to do, you know, I just
Speaker 1: want to get all the speculation out of my system,
Speaker 1: you know. And so we'll see, you know, if it's
Speaker 1: going to be more of a pretty much straightforward research discussion.
Speaker 1: But I would love to know. I would love to
Speaker 1: be like I wish Mike could come anonymously so I
Speaker 1: could just ask him, like, what do you think is
Speaker 1: really going on? Man? Come on, tell me level with me.
Speaker 1: If no one was going to know, if no one
Speaker 1: was going to listen to this, what is this? What
Speaker 1: in the world is this? Now we haven't even really
Speaker 1: got into the interesting part yet, so I guess I'll
Speaker 1: stop talking.
Speaker 2: So that's making the connection between life and consciousness. Now.
Speaker 2: Another way to make this connection is by considering anesthesia,
Speaker 2: which are medically miraculous.
Speaker 3: Yes, so we have volatile.
Speaker 2: Anesthetics and we have different kinds of injectable anesthetics on
Speaker 2: focusing on the vile, volatile ones. We vaporize them and
Speaker 2: breathe them in like a gas. And it turns out
Speaker 2: those kind work on everything alive, not just us and
Speaker 2: primates or mammals, but also invertebrates, single cell creatures that
Speaker 2: have no neurons at all, and even plants.
Speaker 1: This should be the end of the discussion. You know,
Speaker 1: this should be it. Let me let me give you
Speaker 1: some background. We don't really have a good sense about
Speaker 1: how anesthesia works. There's a lot of theories about gabba
Speaker 1: receptors and ion channels and neurons. No one wants to
Speaker 1: entertain the idea that they could function, that could act
Speaker 1: on a much simpler structure because what are the implications. Well,
Speaker 1: what does anesthesia do? Anesthesia turns consciousness off. So whatever
Speaker 1: structure the anesthesia interacts with must be the structure that
Speaker 1: is key to conscious experience, right, Because if this molecule,
Speaker 1: this anesthesia molecule, turns off consciousness, it's the key to consciousness.
Speaker 1: What is the luck, what is it attaching to? What
Speaker 1: is it interacting with? And because we have we have
Speaker 1: such a neuron dominant framework for the brain and how
Speaker 1: the brain works, and how consciousness works. We want to
Speaker 1: assume it must be that anesthesia directly affects neurons. However,
Speaker 1: anesthesia also affects plants and single cell organisms. What are
Speaker 1: plants and single cell organisms missing. They're missing neurons, they're
Speaker 1: missing neurons. So surely can't be the neuron. And you
Speaker 1: can like equivocate, you can say, well, maybe there's something
Speaker 1: like a neuron blah blah blah blah. No, no, listen, listen, stop, stop,
Speaker 1: stop the binding side of this molecule. That's that's the key.
Speaker 1: Where where do these molecules bind? What is their target?
Speaker 1: What is the effector it can't be neurons, It can't
Speaker 1: be neuron cell membrane, It can't be an ion channel
Speaker 1: in a neuron. It can't be a receptor in a
Speaker 1: neuron because single cell organisms don't have that. And these
Speaker 1: drugs do the same things across all these creatures. And
Speaker 1: there's a great quote on the screen right now by
Speaker 1: Claude Bernard that says, what is alive must sense and
Speaker 1: can be anesthetized. The rest is dead. And this is true,
Speaker 1: This is just foundationally true. This is key it's no
Speaker 1: wonder that one of the coolest theories of consciousness comes
Speaker 1: from an antithesiologist, because what an anise geologists do. They
Speaker 1: turn consciousness on and off. And they try to do
Speaker 1: so without turning your heart on and off. That's the
Speaker 1: other equally important competing factor. But they turn consciousness on
Speaker 1: and off in a reversible manner. That's the key, because
Speaker 1: you can turn consciousness on and off a lot of ways.
Speaker 1: You could get a forty five caliber could do that,
Speaker 1: but you can't bring them back easily. So the ability
Speaker 1: to reversibly turn consciousness off, that's what antithesiologists do. And
Speaker 1: how interesting is it that we don't know how their
Speaker 1: drugs work until maybe now. But you guys have to understand,
Speaker 1: this is pretty controversial. There's not widespread acceptance of this
Speaker 1: because it really undermines, in my opinion, the neuroscientific framework
Speaker 1: for interpreting consciousness because if the neuron isn't necessary for consciousness,
Speaker 1: then we've got a real problem. But now listen, it's
Speaker 1: still physical explanation. We're we're not invoking the soul or
Speaker 1: the spirit yet, but it does just it's pretty This
Speaker 1: is people don't like this. People don't like to hear this,
Speaker 1: especially neuroscientists.
Speaker 2: And so for those creatures, we don't know if they're conscious,
Speaker 2: But what we can.
Speaker 3: Observe is these gases reversibly.
Speaker 2: Stop their wiggling around, and so Claude Bernard basically used
Speaker 2: anesthesia almost as a definition of life.
Speaker 3: If it's alive, it can be anesthetized.
Speaker 2: So I've already pointed out some of these things don't
Speaker 2: have neurons, but they're sensitive to the same chemicals that
Speaker 2: put us to sleep for surgery. So this is a
Speaker 2: table showing a list of proteins and cellular components that
Speaker 2: I that volatile anesthetics bind to. And so these are
Speaker 2: candidate molecular targets that might be part of how these
Speaker 2: gases make us on conscious.
Speaker 3: I circled the ones.
Speaker 2: I circled the microtubules because those are the ones I'm
Speaker 2: going to focus on. So the field tends to assume that,
Speaker 2: because these gases are so they say, promiscuous, they bind
Speaker 2: to many different proteins. The assumption is they probably make
Speaker 2: us unconscious by some combined effect.
Speaker 3: On many different proteins. But there are a number.
Speaker 2: Of facts that suggest instead that although.
Speaker 3: They bind the many things.
Speaker 2: The functional effect on consciousness is coming from one main target,
Speaker 2: one main molecular target. And the first of these facts
Speaker 2: is the so called Meyer Overton correlation here, which is
Speaker 2: this linear relationship, although it's on log log scale, but
Speaker 2: this very strict relationship between how well these different chemicals are,
Speaker 2: how soluble they are an olive oil that predicts how
Speaker 2: much you need of that anesthetic to put someone to sleep.
Speaker 2: So the solubility in lipids is predicting how effective these
Speaker 2: chemicals are as an anesthetic. And why that's suggestive or
Speaker 2: why it's remarkable is that these are these different chemicals
Speaker 2: on the on the chart are very diverse chemically. Some
Speaker 2: of them are just single elements, single atoms, like nitrogen
Speaker 2: crypton ze xenon. Xenon is an anesthetic at a high
Speaker 2: enough concentration, So they don't these chemicals.
Speaker 3: Don't really have chemical similarities.
Speaker 2: What they have in common is their tendency to go
Speaker 2: into hydrophobic pockets in cells.
Speaker 3: That's that's the solubility in fatty stuff. Excuse me.
Speaker 2: So that relationships is suggesting that rather than some kind
Speaker 2: of specific chemical lock and key binding as is typical
Speaker 2: of most drugs, these kinds of drugs maybe are interacting
Speaker 2: by a relatively.
Speaker 3: Non specific physical interaction.
Speaker 2: Similarly, the second part here, the second panel, is to
Speaker 2: argue against the idea that these gases are primarily working
Speaker 2: on ion channels. So iron channels are the gates in
Speaker 2: the membranes of our neurons that let charged ions in
Speaker 2: and out, and that's how that's how we create the
Speaker 2: electrical signals that neurons use to communicate with each other
Speaker 2: and that they use to communicate with muscles. So we
Speaker 2: know that whatever our mind is, it must be able
Speaker 2: to translate its commands into action potentials to talk to muscles.
Speaker 2: And so that's you know, because ion channels govern those
Speaker 2: action potentials. That's why people tend to focus on the
Speaker 2: ion channels as the likely targets of anesthetics. But if
Speaker 2: you consider that, what this charge is showing is how
Speaker 2: if you take the half of an effective dose of
Speaker 2: one anesthetic and half of an effective dose of another
Speaker 2: anesthetic dose, you can put them together and get approximately
Speaker 2: one effective dose. But the pairs here are chosen such
Speaker 2: that one of the chemicals in the pair has a
Speaker 2: strong effect on a particular ion channel receptor, like maybe
Speaker 2: the inhibitory gabbot receptors and the other one does not.
Speaker 2: And so the fact that you can put them together
Speaker 2: and get a full dose is arguing against any single
Speaker 2: ion channel being the primary target. And the authors who
Speaker 2: put this review together also concluded they couldn't come up
Speaker 2: with any combination of ion channels that could explain how
Speaker 2: these anesthetics put us to sleep. So those are some facts,
Speaker 2: some observations to suggest maybe there's one primary target. And
Speaker 2: you know, the primary target I'm going to suggest is microtubules,
Speaker 2: and so this paper is some theoretical support for that idea.
Speaker 2: Tubulin are the pieces the that polymerize into microtubules. And
Speaker 2: so they did a quantum chemical simulation of different anesthetic
Speaker 2: molecules binding to tubulin and how that binding disrupts or
Speaker 2: does not disrupt the vibrations, the dipole vibrations that I
Speaker 2: mentioned earlier that are supposed to be the substrate of consciousness.
Speaker 2: And so they found that the more you mess with
Speaker 2: those vibrations, the stronger of an anesthetic we're talking about.
Speaker 2: And so, in other words, by assuming that anesthetics are operate,
Speaker 2: are binding to microtubules to cause their effects on consciousness,
Speaker 2: they more or less reproduce that Meyer Overton correlation, and
Speaker 2: I don't think that can be said for any other
Speaker 2: candidate molecular target. So this is consistent with the possibility
Speaker 2: that microtubules are the main molecular target by which volatile
Speaker 2: anesthetics make us unconscious. And so that's also consistent with
Speaker 2: the possibility that they might be the substrate of consciousness.
Speaker 3: It doesn't prove it by itself.
Speaker 2: And moreover, well, yeah, so yeah, there's some further evidence.
Speaker 3: I want to mention.
Speaker 2: Here's a bit more about microtubules what they look like
Speaker 2: in an em electron micrograph, and you can see the
Speaker 2: so called microtubule associated proteins forming these cross bridges amongst them,
Speaker 2: so they allow them to make larger scale structures, and
Speaker 2: they also help keep the microtubules from falling apart. My
Speaker 2: anesthetic result, or excuse me, my experimental result published in
Speaker 2: twenty twenty four is this pretty simple experiment.
Speaker 3: Where excuse me.
Speaker 2: There's this class of drugs, taxing drugs that bind to
Speaker 2: microtubules and they are used as anti cancer drugs because
Speaker 2: we already mentioned how microtubules are major players in mitosis.
Speaker 2: They use these drugs against cancer. Most of these drugs
Speaker 2: don't penetrate the blood brain barrier, so they.
Speaker 3: Don't get into the brain very well.
Speaker 2: But recently people have been developing versions of these drugs
Speaker 2: that do get into the brain, and so we used
Speaker 2: We gave one of those to our rats and simply
Speaker 2: observed that when we expose them to isofluorine, a particular
Speaker 2: anesthetic gas that's also used on humans, if they had
Speaker 2: epob in their system binding to microtubules, then it took
Speaker 2: them longer to fall unconscious under the gas.
Speaker 3: Here's what it looked like, how we measured it. Unconsciousness.
Speaker 2: It's the latency to the loss of writing reflex. That means,
Speaker 2: if you flip the rat on its back, if it's awake.
Speaker 1: It animal research is so interesting. I don't do it,
Speaker 1: but all these little techniques they have, you know, the
Speaker 1: whisker response saying this is the loss of writing reflex.
Speaker 1: You know, they basically flood this thing with gas and
Speaker 1: then they put it on his back, and if he
Speaker 1: stays on his back or takes a really long time
Speaker 1: to get up, you know, you time that and that's
Speaker 1: sort of you operationally define as conscious or unconscious, because, yeah,
Speaker 1: an awake rat if you've put it on his back.
Speaker 1: It's going to flip over immediately. It's not going to
Speaker 1: be happy about that. So basically, just recap. You have
Speaker 1: this drug that binds to microtubules, have atholm B. So
Speaker 1: you put two groups of rats in two separate enclosures.
Speaker 1: You administer epithelium B to one group. So now that
Speaker 1: group's microtubules are saturated and epithelium B, so the amount
Speaker 1: the availability for other drugs to bind to microtubules is diminished.
Speaker 1: It's sort of an antagonistic binding effect. It's now any
Speaker 1: other drug that binds some microtubules will have to compete
Speaker 1: with epithelion B. And so sure enough, if you flood
Speaker 1: the chambers with with anesthetic gas, the group that was
Speaker 1: not administered epithelim B goes unconscious, as it should, it's anesthetized. Anesthetized,
Speaker 1: the group that had epithelium B injections stays awake, stays
Speaker 1: conscious will probably be a better way of saying it.
Speaker 1: And I think eventually you know they do, they do
Speaker 1: go to sleep for whatever reason. You know, the anesthetic
Speaker 1: outcompetes or yet the epithelion B has bound to every
Speaker 1: site or the epithelum B has a half life and
Speaker 1: it wears off. Whatever the reason, you know, but the
Speaker 1: point is the only way that should work. The only
Speaker 1: way is because of the microtubules. Unless I don't know
Speaker 1: the criticism, it could be the epithelium B also binds
Speaker 1: to other things, and so someone might argue, well, maybe
Speaker 1: it was something else, you know, So maybe that's something
Speaker 1: I could ask Mike, But uh, I call them Mike.
Speaker 1: We're on a first name basis. And anyway, it's a
Speaker 1: pretty cool experiment that this is the type this is
Speaker 1: the type of experiment I love. Like earlier he mentioned like, hey,
Speaker 1: people think that it's the ion channels. So what what
Speaker 1: this study did is, you know, they found a dose
Speaker 1: of a drug that's known to buy on bind to
Speaker 1: ion channels. Right, let's call it ten milligrams, and when
Speaker 1: you administer that dose to a mouse and mouse goes unconscious. Now,
Speaker 1: let's remove half of that dose, five milligrams and replace
Speaker 1: it with five milligrams of a different anesthetic that we
Speaker 1: know does not bind to microtubula or two ion channels,
Speaker 1: and let's administer that and then it works the exact
Speaker 1: same way. You know, and you know they fall asleep
Speaker 1: in the same amount of time, the same amount of
Speaker 1: drug is needed to get the desired effect. So it's
Speaker 1: just it's very clear that it's not the ion channels,
Speaker 1: but we want it to be the ion channels, and
Speaker 1: that may not make sense to you. The reason neuroscientists
Speaker 1: want it to be the ion channels is because ion
Speaker 1: channels is how action potentials are generated. Action potential potentials
Speaker 1: are nerve signals. It's this brief reversal of membrane potential.
Speaker 1: We should do an episode on it as fascinating. I
Speaker 1: talked about it quite a bit on My Brothers of
Speaker 1: the Serpent episode. If you want to try to find that,
Speaker 1: I think they titled a God's Eye View. I'm not
Speaker 1: sure anyway, So you have this brief reversal of memorane
Speaker 1: potential that travels down the axon this long tail of
Speaker 1: the neuron, and when it gets to the end, neurotransmitter
Speaker 1: is released. Neurotransmitter creates potentially a action potential in the
Speaker 1: next neuron in the chain. And so in this way
Speaker 1: we have electrical signals moving back and forth between neurons,
Speaker 1: and we propose most neuroscientists propose that consciousness is an
Speaker 1: emergent property of this process. Highly complex interactions, convergence, divergence,
Speaker 1: reinforcing loop, parallel processing, serial processing, all of these global
Speaker 1: workspace theory, integrated information theory. It's this summation of basically
Speaker 1: switch flipping the way chat GPT works. Essentially, we have input,
Speaker 1: we have outputs, we have parameters, they're weighted, you know,
Speaker 1: some pathways are stronger than others. And out of this
Speaker 1: emerges the subjective experience of being alive, of being embodied.
Speaker 1: To me, that's a huge category air. But that's just
Speaker 1: my opinion. And so that whole thing, the whole ivory
Speaker 1: tower that this theory is, or the foundations of the
Speaker 1: theory that this ivory tower is built upon, is all
Speaker 1: based on ion channels, voltage gated sodium channels open and
Speaker 1: the ax on hillock sodium rushes in. This reverses the
Speaker 1: negative potential, where the inside of the neuron is more
Speaker 1: negative than the outside. And there you have it. This
Speaker 1: is electrical communication. Electrical signals are sent. Okay, So a
Speaker 1: drug that makes you unconscious, if that's what consciousness is,
Speaker 1: if consciousness comes from that, then any drug that affects
Speaker 1: consciousness should affect ion channels, it should bind to ion
Speaker 1: channels or do something else like that, it should alter
Speaker 1: synaptic transmission. Right, so maybe the ion channels, maybe the
Speaker 1: action potentials are still being sent, but for whatever reason,
Speaker 1: their arrival at the end of a neuron at the
Speaker 1: axon terminal doesn't do anything acts you know, neurotransmitter isn't
Speaker 1: released or something like that. So there's always there's always
Speaker 1: a fallback position. It's a battle, right, and the mainstream
Speaker 1: neuroscientists are up, you know, and the trenches I'm gonna
Speaker 1: take this metaphor all the way, and they're being bombarded
Speaker 1: by experimental evidence, right, their position is being mortared into oblivion.
Speaker 1: So they retreat, they fall back, and they to a
Speaker 1: new trench. They take cover, and they reinford, they dig
Speaker 1: in and now they're entrenched in some new position. But
Speaker 1: they did it just continuously. They're losing ground, they're losing ground,
Speaker 1: they're losing ground, and this is just the latest iteration.
Speaker 2: Of that well immediately flip itself back onto its feet.
Speaker 2: And so we also made sure were the people taking
Speaker 2: this measurement were blind to whether the rat had epob
Speaker 2: or not. And then we got these results showing that
Speaker 2: it took them sixty nine seconds longer on average to
Speaker 2: fall asleep if they had EPOB in their system. And
Speaker 2: so the way we interpret that is the EPOB is
Speaker 2: binding to the microtubules and it's taking them longer to
Speaker 2: fall asleep in that condition. So we're inferring the isofluorane
Speaker 2: was trying to bind to the microtubules to make the
Speaker 2: rats go asleep. That by itself does not implicate a
Speaker 2: quantum model, so we can consider how you might account
Speaker 2: for that finding under a classical model. And in both
Speaker 2: quantum n classical models, the focus is not on raw
Speaker 2: firing rates but on functional connectivity. So both kinds of
Speaker 2: viewpoints agree that if you disconnect different parts of the brain,
Speaker 2: then you go unconscious. And so one way we could
Speaker 2: imagine that happening under the classical model is if isofluorine
Speaker 2: is somehow messing with the microtubules. And I mentioned how
Speaker 2: they're like railroad tracks.
Speaker 1: For okay, I want to just explain that a little bit.
Speaker 1: So okay, so say we can see that it's not
Speaker 1: about ion channel, so it's not about firing rates, which
Speaker 1: is what he just said. It sounds like that's already
Speaker 1: been conceded rights. They're already entrenched in their position, like, okay,
Speaker 1: so it's not about firing rates, fine, what it's about
Speaker 1: is disconnecting regions of the brain from each other. And
Speaker 1: so we can test that. We can put someone under
Speaker 1: an fMRI and we could see that different brain regions
Speaker 1: are no longer in synchrony when one region activates, meaning
Speaker 1: it demands more oxygen from the blood, or that there's
Speaker 1: a change in oxygen in the blood maybe is a
Speaker 1: better way of saying it, there's not a corresponding change
Speaker 1: in some other brain region. That would imply both brain
Speaker 1: regions are either more active or less active in synchrony,
Speaker 1: and so minister anesthesia. And that happens all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: all these cohesive like synchronous networks of activity now sort
Speaker 1: of decouple and they are sort of all are functioning independently.
Speaker 1: They're still active, they're still firing, but they're decoupled. And
Speaker 1: so therefore it must be that these chemicals are affecting
Speaker 1: synaptic release. Now that could still be from an ion channel.
Speaker 1: I think it's calcium ion channels and the axon terminal
Speaker 1: that open up and trigger neurotransmitter release. It could be wrong.
Speaker 1: I think it's calcium anyway, So it could be that,
Speaker 1: or it could be something else. It could block the receptors,
Speaker 1: something could happen that prevents neuronal communication without changing neuronal firing,
Speaker 1: and so this would be the interpretation. It would be Okay, fine,
Speaker 1: the chemical does bind to microtubules. You win? Are you happy?
Speaker 1: Don't forget microtubules are the railroads that transport neurotransmitter to
Speaker 1: the end of the axon. So couldn't you just as
Speaker 1: easily conclude that anesthesia binds to microtubules and stops what's
Speaker 1: called vesicular trafficking, the movement of vesicles filled with neurotransmitter
Speaker 1: down the axon, so there's no synaptic release when the
Speaker 1: action potential reaches reaches the end of the axon. It's
Speaker 1: a great point. Now, it's keep in mind, that's a
Speaker 1: huge like they've seated a lot of ground already, right Like, okay, fine,
Speaker 1: maybe it is the microtubules, but the right this isn't good.
Speaker 1: They've they've they've dug back in. They lost the ground,
Speaker 1: but they've dug back in, and so he's gonna address this.
Speaker 2: Or proteins that get taken to different places in the cell.
Speaker 2: But that includes synaptic proteins and synaptic transmitters. So we
Speaker 2: can imagine if you mess up that transport along the microtubules,
Speaker 2: maybe you would slow down or eliminate synaptic release at
Speaker 2: axon terminals, and that could overall reduce activity and cause
Speaker 2: disconnection of different parts of the brain. And so that's
Speaker 2: a potential way we could imagine, even if the brain
Speaker 2: is purely classical, even if consciousness is purely classical, how
Speaker 2: we could get such a result. But I'm showing it
Speaker 2: as not supported because experimentally, we have some couple of
Speaker 2: studies showing that in fact, this gas isofluorane, does affect
Speaker 2: synaptic transmission. But those papers looked into the mechanism by
Speaker 2: which the gas affects synaptic transmission, and it involved mitochondria
Speaker 2: and synaptic proteins rather than the microtubules, So that effect
Speaker 2: on synaptic transmission doesn't seem to be through microtubules current evidence.
Speaker 2: So that leads me to consider the alternative, the quantum idea.
Speaker 2: Noting along the way this bit of evidence that so
Speaker 2: this is using. This is a study of tadpoles. Now
Speaker 2: we don't know if they're conscious or not. But this
Speaker 2: group engineered so this is a completely different kind of anesthesia.
Speaker 3: But they engineered an anesthetic.
Speaker 2: That would own that would that was targeting microtubules specifically,
Speaker 2: and they found they could stop their tadpoles from swimming
Speaker 2: around reversibly just by targeting microtubules, so supporting that microtubules
Speaker 2: might be enough by themselves to cause to cause unconsciousness,
Speaker 2: which is consistent with the possibility that they are the
Speaker 2: substrate of consciousness. Okay, but why this obsession with the
Speaker 2: quantum models. This is the end of my abstract of
Speaker 2: our experimental rat paper, and we say this finding is
Speaker 2: predicted by models that posit consciousness as a property of
Speaker 2: a quantum physical state of neuro microtubules.
Speaker 3: So I know you're interested in these guys.
Speaker 1: I think we'll get to the quantum aspect next. So
Speaker 1: I think we've we've we've followed along with Mike here
Speaker 1: and it's it seems pretty clear to I think it's intuitive.
Speaker 1: Let's say that the microtubules are are very important to
Speaker 1: consciousness and perhaps even the whole bag. You know, now,
Speaker 1: not to overstate it, right. Consciousness is a complex phenomenon
Speaker 1: with many different aspects, but it does seem like the
Speaker 1: microtubules are the switch that turns it on and off.
Speaker 1: Something about their function is key to consciousness, and it's
Speaker 1: not necessarily a mundane explanation, like the fact that you know,
Speaker 1: if you close the highway the car stopped flowing right
Speaker 1: if if you, if you, if you put some rocks
Speaker 1: in the railroad tracks, the neurotransmitter can't get to the
Speaker 1: end of the axe on it. It's something else. Who knows.
Speaker 1: Maybe it's mundane, maybe it's classical, maybe it's fantastical. Maybe
Speaker 1: it's quantum. And so we'll get into that what that
Speaker 1: means next time. I am I'm off, ladies and gentlemen,
Speaker 1: i am going. I'm gonna share. I'm gonna overshare. I'm
Speaker 1: going with my family to Pokemon pre release. What is
Speaker 1: Pokemon pre release? You ask, Well, a couple times a
Speaker 1: year Pokemon comes out with new Pokemon cards. I'm so embarrassed.
Speaker 1: And you can go and pay money much less than
Speaker 1: normal because these things are so expensive now it's crazy.
Speaker 1: You can pay much less than normal to get a
Speaker 1: big box of cards, and then part of the deal
Speaker 1: is that you will put them together into a deck
Speaker 1: and you will all battle in a tournament, and my
Speaker 1: wife and daughter are obsessed. Brilliant's my wife? Don't tell
Speaker 1: her I said this. My absurdly beautiful, like my stunningly
Speaker 1: beautiful Italian wife is obsessed with playing Pokemon. Can you
Speaker 1: believe it? This is every thirteen year old boy's dream
Speaker 1: come true? So yeah, so truly. It's that I don't
Speaker 1: really like going. I don't like leaving the house, you
Speaker 1: know me, So, but I go and she'll probably win
Speaker 1: the whole thing. I'll be in last place, my daughter
Speaker 1: will be second, and my son will plan. Is I bad?
Speaker 1: And it's a humiliation ritual. It's just it's just a
Speaker 1: way to humble dad. I think you know. I think
Speaker 1: they love it. My kids love it. They love when
Speaker 1: I say something wrong, when I trip, when I bump
Speaker 1: into a wall, they laugh, They just ha. They love it.
Speaker 1: What does this mean? What does this mean? I need
Speaker 1: the Freudians, the psychoanalyst tell me what this means anyway,
Speaker 1: So I'm gonna get humbled, deeply humbled by some fifteen
Speaker 1: year olds. Dude. Teenagers are terrifying and they're just so mean,
Speaker 1: and they're just gonna destroy me. They think more quickly
Speaker 1: than I do. You know. I'm just like, I'm dazzled.
Speaker 1: I'm frazzled. Cards are flying, they're saying things. They could
Speaker 1: be cheating. I wouldn't even know. They're like the super
Speaker 1: hammer does a three hundred damage and the seven energies,
Speaker 1: you know, stack and I'm using the ability and I'm
Speaker 1: just like, bro, just take it. It's fine, it's fine,
Speaker 1: I trust you. Just just it's okay. But I'm gonna
Speaker 1: do it. I'm gonna hang in there for you. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna be thinking about you all, and I'm gonna try
Speaker 1: to do you proud. Who knows I might win next
Speaker 1: time you talk to me, I might be a champion. Anyways, well,
Speaker 1: I'm have to do that on this very nice Saturday,
Speaker 1: beautiful day. Not really, it's one hundred and ten degrees
Speaker 1: here where I live. It's miserable, but it is beautiful,
Speaker 1: just miserable. So, guys, thank you for listening. I hope
Speaker 1: you share my deep fascination with this topic. I don't know,
Speaker 1: it's a little bit more technical in the stuff we
Speaker 1: normally talk about, but I really see something here. I
Speaker 1: see something here. What does this mean? What are the
Speaker 1: philosophical and theological implications of this well, I don't know.
Speaker 1: I mean, I think it's safe to say that we
Speaker 1: know a lot less than we thought we did. It's
Speaker 1: just all more complex than we could have possibly imagined.
Speaker 1: And listen the moment you start invoking quantum into subjective
Speaker 1: human experience and quantum fields and quality and you know
Speaker 1: resonance and you know these quantum dipole resonant frequencies, and
Speaker 1: it's like, okay, all right, maybe the lines between this
Speaker 1: and hopefully hopefully Mike doesn't hear me say this, he
Speaker 1: might not come to the show. But the lines between
Speaker 1: these things and things like spirit, I don't know, they
Speaker 1: get a little fuzzy. I just you know, like like
Speaker 1: the virtue the virtues of these things, like the fact
Speaker 1: that I won't get into it right now, but that
Speaker 1: the idea that there is some sort of quantum nature
Speaker 1: to what it means to be conscious, I don't know.
Speaker 1: I mean, to me, it's it's hard to imagine something
Speaker 1: like this evolving in a truly and tropic universe, you know,
Speaker 1: and and and in just a universe some matter and
Speaker 1: energy just and you hit fast forward millions of years,
Speaker 1: millions of years, millions of years, millions of years. I
Speaker 1: would just anticipate more entropy, you know, second law of thermodynamics.
Speaker 1: I would just interpret maybe everyone wanting to get some
Speaker 1: beautiful patterns caused by physical laws. You know, some some
Speaker 1: some dust clouds with spiral and and and collapsing on
Speaker 1: each other and form a sun. I can I could
Speaker 1: picture that, and that sun would eventually die and be
Speaker 1: extinguished as the millions of years the epochs fly by. Right,
Speaker 1: But the idea of like crystalline quantum networks that are
Speaker 1: scaler and they they they they resonate within your mind,
Speaker 1: within the wet soup of your brain. And it's not
Speaker 1: just an amazing physical phenomenon. They get it give rise
Speaker 1: to awareness. Suddenly you're like, I am right, I am
Speaker 1: that I am, and you're looking out into the world.
Speaker 1: You have an inner world, there's an outer world that
Speaker 1: you're aware of, and you think and you dream and
Speaker 1: you feel and you who's feeling these things? Right? This
Speaker 1: is more of an algorithm. This is something truly special
Speaker 1: and truly unique and in my mind, truly inexplicable. I
Speaker 1: just think it gets really I mean, they do it,
Speaker 1: they do it, they all do it. You know, they say,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, evolution makes sense because conscious awareness, you know,
Speaker 1: you're you might be more survival directed. Maybe, I mean,
Speaker 1: I think there's simpler ways to evolve survival directed organisms.
Speaker 1: This ties into the episode we played about doctor last week.
Speaker 1: He's like, well, hey, if AI models aren't conscious, then
Speaker 1: we've proven that there's no selective pressure for consciousness because
Speaker 1: very simply through math, through network connectivity, we can do
Speaker 1: anything a human can do. We can have conversations, we
Speaker 1: can reason, we can do art, we can do this,
Speaker 1: we can do that, we can do that. So there
Speaker 1: is no evolutionary selective pressure for consciousness. Therefore AI models
Speaker 1: are conscious. That was Richard Dawkins's conclusion. My conclusion would
Speaker 1: be no, no, no, to stop, just stop rightther stop with
Speaker 1: your core premise. There is no evolutionary pressure for consciousness,
Speaker 1: yet we have it. So what's the conclusion. Maybe somebody
Speaker 1: wanted us to have it, made us, had it designed
Speaker 1: the conditions of the simulation so that we would in
Speaker 1: fact get it. Just sure seems like we're in a
Speaker 1: ocean of conscious awareness from the simple protozoa that has
Speaker 1: some fragment, some little sliver of consciousness. To us, it's
Speaker 1: pretty cool, pretty cool, What a time to be alive.
Speaker 1: What a world we find ourselves in. Thanks everybody, wish
Speaker 1: me luck. I hope I draw good cards. That's the
Speaker 1: beauty of the pre release. You kind just make a comment,
Speaker 1: there's no other show like this nowhere else will someone
Speaker 1: just seamlessly swish back and forth between the big questions
Speaker 1: and explaining Pokemon pre Release to you. That's why you
Speaker 1: folks come here, That's why you leave me the five
Speaker 1: star reviews. That's why you tell your friends about the show,
Speaker 1: and that's why you buy the book. But yeah, Pokemon
Speaker 1: pre Release. It's kind of a level setter because you're
Speaker 1: not bringing a deck with you. You're just drawing cards.
Speaker 1: So there's a luck component. So it could be my day.
Speaker 1: It could be my chance to make my kids proud.
Speaker 1: Instead of them laughing at me today, they'll be in awe.
Speaker 1: I'm going four and oh I might make some kids cry.
Speaker 1: But that's the price I'm willing to pay. They should
Speaker 1: have practiced harder, all right, Everybody, stay tuned for the
Speaker 1: next episode. Email me questions for Mike at God'syviewbook at
Speaker 1: gmail dot com. Stay safe out there, God bless