Scientific Progress on Cyber Atomics in the Leary-Wilson 8-Circuit Model of Consciousness
INTRODUCTION
In a previous article, I summarized my review of the Leary/Wilson 8 circuit model compared to the Graves developmental model. The jumping off point was Leary’s re-work of Exo-Psychology (1977) as Info-Psychology (1987). Having been influenced by Leary and Wilson, I had some feeling that the 7thand 8th circuits as I had learned them didn’t seem realistic in a number of ways. But I found new meaning in the model, at least in the recasting of those circuits as Cyber-genetic and Cyber-atomic.
“Cyber-genetic — “This stage imprints the DNA code, receiving integrating and transmitting RNA signals, thus operating at species-time, making possible biological immortality, and symbiosis with Higher Life forms. DNA consciousness.”
Cyber-atomic — “access to atomic information through nano-technology.” (Again, pretty trendy. [1])
Circuits 7 and 8 seemed no more specific than they had been 10 years earlier, at least as I read it then. But wait! — “the Seventh [circuit] Brain learns to control, integrate, organize Neuro-genetic signals and manipulate Chromosomes.” Emphasis mine — well hello CRISPR gene editing, 20 years later!!
RAW references Isaac Asimov in both The Starseed Signals and Cosmic Trigger. Asimov observed a 60 year lag between first understanding of new scientific principles and applications that transform the world. [2] He expected genetics would follow that trajectory — starting from 1944, then 2004 would see biological breakthroughs based on DNA structure. Hmmm.
And then, for Circuit 8, “The Cyber-atomic stage imprints sub-nuclear quantum-physical and gravitational signals, thus transcending biological existence. Quantum Consciousness.” Locating a higher intelligence within the atomic nucleus might seem teleological and speculative. But it is interesting that starting in the 1990’s, no less a figure than Nobel prize winning physicist Roger Penrose, with co-author Stuart Hameroff, have posited that consciousness literally arises via quantum level interactions inside brain structures known as microtubules. [3] (More on this below.)
Prepped by Cosmic Trigger, I was primed to read the Tao of Physics, the Dancing Wu Li Masters et al, and my standard talking points, adopted from RAW, were that Bell’s theorem in physics (non-locality) allowed in theory lots of psi phenomena like precognition or remote viewing.”
It took 20 years or so to be disillusioned about any ability to see 8th circuit manifestations. Lots of money got made by the likes of Dean Radin, Roger Nelson, and other contemporary folks handwaving about psi phenomena must be true because quantum theory says so. But essentially, I had seen nothing happen for most of that time to validate macro-physical effects manifesting to corroborate non-locality and other weirdness. (Radin/Nelson research is all about statistical variance, with no attempt to find actual mechanisms of Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance.”)
But if Leary and Wilson were prophetic in biology, just not exactly in the way they characterized it at first, what about physics? So, invoking the Asimov law, Bell’s Theorem in 1964 plus 60 is, well, right about now.
It turns out I was unaware until the last ten years or so that there have been two major developments in the practical applications of quantum mechanics, one in terms of computers and advanced materials engineering, and the other within brain science. The first is demonstrating the state of the art of quantum effects at the macro level (rather than sub-atomic,) and the other is testing a theory that consciousness resides at the quantum level within particular sites in the brain.
This is definitely cool — quantum computing and quantum materials at the macro level rather than sub atomic. Now perhaps there can be some better proofs for remote viewing or telepathy that quantum mechanics allowed in theory (per RAW,) but about which I had grown skeptical. It seems there may even be mechanisms to tap into those quantum effects characterizing consciousness itself within an individual brain, and then transmit that information through a quantum network to other brains. (This is sort of a literal reading of the 8th Circuit. Mike Gathers among others makes an interesting case about how else the 8th Circuit might actually manifest.[i] )
FIRST AREA OF DEVELOPMENT — STATE OF THE ART OF QUANTUM EFFECTS AT THE MACRO LEVEL
Developments in quantum engineering have shown some success in actually building technology to leverage the strange qualities of quantum mechanics at the macro level.
How It Happens
Entanglement is one quantum-mechanical phenomenon by which particles, once in contact, copy each other’s behavior even when they move away from each other. Now such behavior appears to work on macro objects too.
Two studies with a similar experimental approach show how vibrating objects can become entangled. The experimental method employs extreme supercooling of objects.
“The studies of quantum entanglement, published on 26 April [2021] in Nature, show that entanglement is possible with larger objects than physicists had previously thought. Although it was theoretically possible to entangle at a macro level, it proved to be a huge challenge in practice. That’s because objects larger than a single atom or light particle suffer from vibrating atoms around the object. A stray atom is very likely to cause the vibrational level of one object to be just slightly different to that of the other, destroying the entanglement.
To prevent this, researchers (from Delft University of Technology and Australia’s University of New South Wales) had to keep all disturbances away from the objects. This required cooling the test area to 0.1 Kelvin (-273.05°C). The physicists then used electromagnetic radiation (microwaves) to achieve entanglement.
This approach worked. Although both groups used a different method in terms of the details, the experiments had the same result: the objects moved in precisely the same way. They ‘knew’ each other’s motion, although the drum heads / feathers couldn’t communicate over their vibrations. That’s what entanglement means for quantum physicists: identical behaviour or state, without the objects talking together about their behaviour.
In both experiments, the entangled objects were relatively large in comparison with a single atom or light particle: a couple of micrometers in size, and comprising billions of atoms. The experimental results now open the door to experiments with even larger entangled objects, triggering all sorts of new (physics) questions: how does entanglement react, for example, to the gravitational forces that influence objects. [ii] “
Another experimental approach to reduce vibrational interference or noise is superconductivity.
“For years, researchers have been able to successfully muffle that noise to observe individual subatomic particles and even large atoms in entangled states. Isolating quantum effects is less a matter of size than of complexity. Observing any system from individual atoms up to microscopic drums means quieting the noise of all the moving parts so that the quantum effects can come out to play. The noisiest variable is usually heat: “Temperature is a form of noise, and it will mask some of those effects and signals you’re looking for,” says Teufel.
He says that many recent demonstrations of large-scale quantum effects take their cues from previous methods used to freeze out the noise in individual atoms: “We’re exploiting the same exquisite techniques, not for single atoms but for quadrillions of atoms, to make things that are closer to engineered devices that we can observe and exploit.”
One approach uses a loop of superconducting wire, usually about a micrometer in diameter, interrupted by junctions of nonsuperconducting material. Superconductivity means electrons flow around the loop without resistance, and the current can be measured at those junctions.
Physicists can use magnetic fields to induce current to flow in both directions around the ring at the same time. That doesn’t mean half go one way and half go the other; all the electrons act as one and simultaneously stream clockwise and counterclockwise. In 2000, Friedman was part of a group that put a large amount of magnetic flux in superposition.[iii]”
Not being a scientist, I was unaware how much work has been going on in this space since the Leary/Wilson speculations.
“Between 1996 and 2016 six Nobel Prizes were given for work related to macroscopic quantum phenomena. Macroscopic quantum phenomena can be observed in superfluid helium and in superconductors, but also in dilute quantum gases, dressed photons such as polaritons and in laser light. Although these media are very different, they are all similar in that they show macroscopic quantum behavior, and in this respect they all can be referred to as quantum fluids. [iv]”
Historically,
“There are many devices available which rely on quantum mechanical effects and have revolutionized society through medicine, optical communication, high-speed internet, and high-performance computing, just to mention a few examples. Nowadays, after the first quantum revolution that brought us lasers, MRI imagers and transistors, a second wave of quantum technologies is expected to impact society in a similar way.”
With all of this engineering work going on, there are now multiple development efforts going on to apply these techniques to particular product activity.
Applications for Macro Scale Quantum Engineering
Recent work on quantum effects at macro-scales is ongoing in the following application types:
- Quantum Computing
- Quantum Materials
- Quantum Sensors
- Quantum Communications Networks and the Quantum Internet
Below are brief summaries of each application type.
Quantum Computing — Quantum computers, instead of bits have qubits. Normal computer bits hold a value of 1 or 0. Quantum bits can hold a simultaneous combination off the two states, thanks to the phenomenon called superposition, where a sub atomic particle theoretically can have multiple positions, but position is not known definitively until observer measures it. (Erwin Schrodinger’s Cat thought experiment was intended to present an absurd result and thus suggest that consciousness is not relevant to science, but see Penrose/Hameroff efforts to reconcile, below.) (See also, Wilson’s Schrodinger’s Cat trilogy as a literary reductio ad absurdam — or was it?)
Operationalizing superposition empowers quantum computers to handle operations at speeds exponentially higher than conventional computers and at much lesser energy consumption. As an example, my hometown Boulder quantum computing startup ColdQuanta uses supercooling to engineer and control large numbers of qubits, a very recent and significant demonstration of scaling the technology. [v] There are other approaches that utilize the superconductor approach as described earlier.
The valuation of quantum computing companies is somewhere north of $5 billion at present, although it is not a mature, commercial product yet. But investments are driven by several commercial applications of quantum computing, most notably (unsurprisingly) in the financial sector.
“Quantum computing is gaining traction in the banking and finance services industry, which is focusing on increasing the speed of trade activities, transactions, and data processing manifolds. One of the significant potential applications of quantum computing is the simulation. Quantum computing helps in the identification of an improved and efficient way to manage financial risks. The processing time and the costs of high-quality solutions can increase exponentially if classical computers are used in financial institutions, while quantum computers can carry out speedy operations at optimized costs. [vi]”
Quantum Manufacturing — Building potentially useful quantum materials is a small but growing market. Such quantum materials include superconductors and graphene.
“Many of them derive their properties from reduced dimensionality, in particular from confinement of electrons to two-dimensional sheets…In all cases, quantum-mechanical effects fundamentally alter properties of the material. [vii]”
Graphene is the most well-known, enabling very thin, very strong materials. But the manufacturing process is difficult and so the overall market is still only in the tens of millions of dollars.
“One of the biggest challenges of the graphene industry will be to reach volume production in the next 2–5 years. The focus will have to be on material consistency and production cost. Cost, of course, is an important factor in itself. Cost has come down considerably since the first commercial appearance of graphene.”
A variant called graphene quantum dots (GQDs) are nanoscale structures of graphene having strong quantum property effects resulting in, among other properties, exceptional photoluminescence.
“Colloidal semiconductor quantum dots (QDs) have numerous potential applications in solar cells, light emitting diodes, bioimaging, electronic displays, and other optoelectronic devices due to their unique size-dependent electro-optical properties, and have thus been of significant research interest.[viii]”
A group of University of Chicago scientists announced they were able to program IBM’s largest quantum computer into a quantum material itself, a type called an exciton condensate. Such condensates may have potential in future technology, because they can conduct energy with almost zero loss. [ix]
Quantum Sensors — Quantum sensing is another application of quantum engineering. Photonic quantum sensing leverages entanglement, and other quantum properties to perform extremely precise measurements. Optical sensing makes use of continuous variable quantum systems such as different degrees of freedom of the electromagnetic field, vibrational modes of solids, and condensates.
In solid-state physics, a quantum sensor is a quantum device that responds to a stimulus. Usually this refers to a sensor that, which has quantized energy levels, uses quantum coherence to measure a physical quantity, or uses entanglement to improve measurements beyond what can be done with classical sensors.[2]
Applications within the quantum sensing field include microscopy, positioning systems, electric and magnetic field sensors, medical imaging, mineral prospecting and seismology. The U.S. military (alas) sees quantum sensing having applications such as replacing GPS in areas without coverage or possibly acting with [surveillance] capabilities or detecting submarine or subterranean structures or nuclear material.[x]
Quantum Communications Networks and the Quantum Internet — Quantum networks facilitate the transmission of information in the form of qubits (quantum bits) between physically separated quantum processors in quantum computers. Quantum networks are thought to enable better network cryptography. For example, “it is impossible to copy data encoded in a quantum state. If one attempts to read the encoded data, the quantum state will be changed due to wave function collapse. This could be used to detect eavesdropping in quantum key distribution.” [xi]
By the same logic as classical computer networking, local quantum networks can be interconnected into a quantum internet.
SECOND AREA OF DEVELOPMENT — QUANTUM EFFECTS INSIDE THE BRAIN
The notion of a quantum internet is of particular interest to me. I have for years been searching for signs of Teilhard de Chardin’s noosphere, or emergent collective consciousness. [xii] There are metaphorical versions of this such as social media, which interconnect many to many, but are not in any physical sense a unified being. A quantum internet might be a building block for linking brain to brain, or consciousness to consciousness. This where the second major development in quantum mechanics comes in, namely quantum effects, and potentially engineering, in the brain itself.
From Leary:
“The Cyber-atomic stage [of human development] imprints sub-nuclear quantum-physical and gravitational signals, thus transcending biological existence. Quantum Consciousness.
Neuro-atomic (meta-physiological) — The highest circuit is “electrolocalized and magnetic=gravitational.” That is, it requires no localized body-platform. Quoting Leary, “Mind you, I don’t say metaphysical. Metaphysical is a dumb word used by people who don’t understand Einstein yet. I’m talking about a quite specific electromagnetic-gravitational field in which mind can manifest without organic bodies. That’s the eight circuit and the highest possible evolutionary slot within this galaxy.” [4] ”
From RAW:
…we do not possess one ‘mind’ — a delusion by conditioning which directs our attention in socially demanded directions. We are also thinking bodies, thinking cells, thinking molecules[that are] 3 ½ billion years old, and thinking atoms as old as the cosmos. God is inside us, say the mystics. [5]
Having had personal experiences of interconnected minds (e.g., chemically mediated or generated in musical experiences) I wondered for years if this was an instance of separate mind/brains firing in sync, or whether there was some physical, electro-magnetic link that was being created or tapped into. The experiences also begged the question of the distinction between what is the mind, and what is consciousness? Thinking about that fundamental question brough me to a long-running debate on the nature of consciousness itself, a conference known as The Science of Consciousness. This conference has brought together philosophers and scientists around a fundamental question — how does one address the “Hard Problem” of consciousness. One can map regions of the brain corresponding to motor skills, memories, and emotions — the Easy Problem, but where does one find in the brain the notion of “what it feels like” to have a mental state, what does it feel like to be me?
Among the contending theories, one stands out for this article as it rests on notions of quantum effects occurring in specific locations in the brain. This was originally put forward by anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff at the University of Arizona.[xiii]
“How does the brain — a lump of ‘pinkish gray meat’ — produce the richness of conscious experience, or any subjective experience at all?
Because brain neurons and synapses appear to act like switches and ‘bits’ in computers, and because brain disorders like depression, Alzheimer’s disease and traumatic brain injury ravage humanity with limited effective therapies, scientists, governments and funding agencies have bet big on the brain-as-computer analogy. Following a series of failures by computers to simulate basic brain functions (much less approach ‘The C-word’, consciousness) scientists were left to ask, in essence, if the brain isn’t a computer, what else could it possibly be?
Actually, the brain is looking more like an orchestra, a multi-scalar vibrational resonance system, than a computer. Brain information patterns repeat over spatiotemporal scales in fractal-like, nested hierarchies of neuronal networks, with resonances and interference beats. One example of a multi- scalar spatial mapping is the 2014 Nobel Prize-winning work (O’Keefe, Moser and Moser) on ‘grid cells’, hexagonal representations of spatial location arrayed in layers of entorhinal cortex, each layer encoding a different spatial scale. Moving from layer to layer in entorhinal cortex is precisely like zooming in and out in a Google map.
Indeed, neuroscientist Karl Pribram’s assessment of the brain as a ‘holographic storage device’…seems now on-target. Holograms encode distributed information as multi- scalar interference of coherent vibrations, e.g. from lasers. Pribram lacked a proper coherent source, a laser in the brain, but evidence now points to structures inside brain neurons called microtubules as sources of laser-like coherence for the brain’s vibrational hierarchy.”
Having made this leap, but not being a physicist, Hameroff sought help, and not just any help.
“For the past 20 years I’ve teamed with British physicist [and Nobel Prize winner] Sir Roger Penrose on a consciousness (‘orchestrated objective reduction’, ‘Orch OR’) linking microtubule quantum processes to fluctuations in the structure of the universe. Our idea was criticized harshly, as the brain seemed too ‘warm, wet and noisy’ for apparently delicate quantum coherence. But evidence now clearly shows (1) plant photosynthesis routinely uses quantum coherence in warm sunlight (if a potato can do it…?), and (2) microtubules have quantum resonances in gigahertz, megahertz and kilohertz frequency ranges (the work of Anirban Bandyopadhyay and colleagues at National Institute of Material Science in Tsukuba, Japan).
These coherent ‘fractal frequencies’ in microtubules apparently couple to even faster, smaller-scale terahertz vibrations among intra-tubulin ‘pi electron resonance clouds’, and to slower ones, e.g., by interference ‘beats’ giving rise to larger scale EEG. My colleagues and I (Craddock et al, 2015) have identified a ‘quantum underground’ inside microtubules where anesthetic gases bind to selectively erase consciousness, dampening and dispersing terahertz dipole vibrations. A multi-scalar, vibrational hierarchy could play key roles in neuronal and brain functions, driven at the ‘bottom’, inside neurons, by microtubule quantum resonators.
The most likely sites for consciousness are microtubule networks in dendrites and soma of cortical layer 5 giant pyramidal neurons whose apical dendrites give rise to EEG. Dendritic-somatic microtubules are unique, being interrupted and arrayed in mixed polarity networks, unsuited for structural support but optimal for information processing, resonance and interference.”
The abstract of their 2013 update of their theory reads:
“The nature of consciousness, the mechanism by which it occurs in the brain, and its ultimate place in the universe are unknown. We proposed in the mid 1990’s that consciousness depends on biologically ‘orchestrated’ coherent quantum processes in collections of microtubules within brain neurons, that these quantum processes correlate with, and regulate, neuronal synaptic and membrane activity, and that the continuous Schrödinger evolution of each such process terminates in accordance with the specific Diósi–Penrose (DP) scheme of ‘objective reduction’ (‘OR’) of the quantum state. This orchestrated OR activity (‘Orch OR’) is taken to result in moments of conscious awareness and/or choice. The DP form of OR is related to the fundamentals of quantum mechanics and space–time geometry, so Orch OR suggests that there is a connection between the brain’s biomolecular processes and the basic structure of the universe. Here we review Orch OR in light of criticisms and developments in quantum biology, neuroscience, physics and cosmology. We also introduce a novel suggestion of ‘beat frequencies’ of faster microtubule vibrations as a possible source of the observed electro-encephalographic (‘EEG’) correlates of consciousness. We conclude that consciousness plays an intrinsic role in the universe. [xiv]”
The Penrose contribution addresses the crux of RAW’s reference to consciousness as the hidden variable that collapses the wave function and solves the Schrodinger paradox. Penrose proposes that gravity is the mechanism for collapsing the wave function into something that actually happens, which is also to say, none too modestly, it is the place to reconcile quantum theory and the theory of general relativity.
Penrose proposed that a spatial quantum superposition collapses as a back-reaction from spacetime, which is curved in different ways by each branch of the superposition. In this sense, one speaks of gravity-related wave function collapse. He also provided a heuristic formula to compute the decay time of the superposition — similar to that suggested earlier by Lajos Diósi, hence the name Diósi–Penrose model. The collapse depends on the effective size of the mass density of particles in the superposition, and is random: this randomness shows up as a diffusion of the particles’ motion, resulting, if charged, in the emission of radiation. Here, we compute the radiation emission rate, which is faint but detectable. We then report the results of a dedicated experiment at the Gran Sasso underground laboratory to measure this radiation emission rate. Our result sets a lower bound on the effective size of the mass density of nuclei, which is about three orders of magnitude larger than previous bounds. This rules out the natural parameter-free version of the Diósi–Penrose model.”
The Hameroff / Penrose theories have begun to attract experimental work, taking advantage of tools such as super cooling and superconductivity, much as quantum engineering work summarized previously. The ongoing work is located in the category of reconciling gravity and quantum theory, or defining how quantum effects operate in the brain; papers on these topics were presented as recently as August 2021 in the Science and Roger Penrose symposium (which deserves a summary article of its own.) [xv]
CONCLUSION:
QUANTUM EFFECTS BETWEEN BRAINS; THE REAL NON-LOCAL CONSCIOUSNESS
And so, we conclude with good Doctor Leary. In Info-psychology, Leary refers to collective consciousness and observes that several circuits reflect collective energies.
“At each chronological stage of species evolution, new imprints for collective-governal realities emerge. These socially-consensual neural-programs determine the positive-negative magnetic poles for culturally conditioned members of the gene-pool. Good/evil. Taboo. Collective consciousness was needed to accomplish the embryonic states of evolution. A fetus or a larval form cannot branch out on hir own. [xvi]”
And further,
“The Cyber-atomic stage imprints sub-nuclear quantum-physical and gravitational signals, thus transcending biological existence. Quantum Consciousness.”
Things may be getting interesting.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engines_of_Creation
[2] TSS, p. 258
[3] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsta.1998.0254
[4] TSS, p. 257
[5] TSS, p. 95–96
<Apologies for the formatting switch for these endnotes.>
[i] Mike Gathers, Two’s Company, Eight’s a Fnord, in New Trajectories: A Journal of Maybe Logic, 2021.
[ii] https://www.deingenieur.nl/artikel/even-macro-objects-can-become-entangled
[iii] https://www.pnas.org/content/116/45/22413
[iv] Jaeger, Gregg (September 2014). “What in the (quantum) world is macroscopic?”. American Journal of Physics. 82 (9): 896–905. Bibcode:2014AmJPh..82..896J. doi:10.1119/1.4878358.
[vi] https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/quantum-computing-market-144888301.html
[vii] https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2017NatPh..13.1045K/abstract
[ix] Reference: “Preparation of an exciton condensate of photons on a 53-qubit quantum computer” by LeeAnn M. Sager, Scott E. Smart and David A. Mazziotti, 9 November 2020, Physical Review Research. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevResearch.2.043205
[x] Kelley M. Sayler (June 7, 2021). Defense Primer: Quantum Technology(PDF) (Report). Congressional Research Service. Retrieved July 22, 2021
[xi] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_cryptography
[xii] https://medium.com/me/stats/post/31017e066055
[xiii] Is Your Brain Really a Computer, or Is It a Quantum Orchestra? Stuart Hameroff, Contributor Anesthesiologist, Professor, Consciousness Researcher 07/09/2015 03:39 pm ET | Updated Jul 08, 2016
[xiv] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1571064513001188
[xv] https://consciousness.arizona.edu/science-roger-penrose-aug-3-6-free-webinar
[xvi] Timothy Leary, Info-Psychology, p. 11. By the way, psychologist Clare Graves makes the same point, noting how stages of development alternate between an “Express Self” stage and a “Sacrifice Self” (i.e.collective) stage.
