What is consciousness? Some philosophers have contended that ‘qualia’, or an experiential medium from which consciousness is derived, exists as a fundamental component of reality. Whitehead, for example, described the universe as being comprised of ‘occasions of experience’. To examine this possibility scientifically, the very nature of physical reality must be re-examined. We must come to terms with the physics of space-time -- as is described by Einstein's general theory of relativity -- and its relation to the fundamental theory of (...) matter -- as described by quantum theory. This leads us to employ a new physics of objective reduction: OR which appeals to a form of ‘quantum gravity’ to provide a useful description of fundamental processes at the quantum/classical borderline . Within the OR scheme, we consider that consciousness occurs if an appropriately organized system is able to develop and maintain quantum coherent superposition until a specific ‘objective’ criterion is reached; the coherent system then self-reduces . We contend that this type of objective self-collapse introduces non-computability, an essential feature of consciousness. OR is taken as an instantaneous event -- the climax of a self-organizing process in fundamental space-time -- and a candidate for a conscious Whitehead-like ‘occasion’ of experience. How could an OR process occur in the brain, be coupled to neural activities, and account for other features of consciousness? We nominate an OR process with the requisite characteristics to be occurring in cytoskeletal microtubules within the brain's neurons. (shrink)

Photons are intrinsically quantum objects and natural long-distance carriers of information in both classical and quantum communications1. Since brain functions involve information and many experiments have shown that quantum entanglement is physically real, we have contemplated from the perspective of our recent hypothesis2 on the possibility of entangling the quantum entities inside the brain with those in an external anaesthetic sample and carried out experiments toward that end. Here we report that applying magnetic pulses to the brain when a general (...) anaesthetic sample was placed in between caused the brain to feel the effect of said anaesthetic for several hours after the treatment as if the test subject had actually inhaled the same. The said effect is consistently reproducible on all four subjects tested. We further found that drinking water exposed to magnetic pulses, laser light, microwave or even flashlight when an anaesthetic sample was placed in between also causes consistently reproducible brain effects in various degrees. We have in addition tested several medications including morphine and obtained consistently reproducible results. Further, through additional experiments we have verified that the said brain effect is the consequence of quantum entanglement between quantum entities inside the brain and those of the chemical substance under study induced by the photons of the magnetic pulses or applied lights. We suggest that the said quantum entities inside the brain are nuclear and/or electron spins and discuss the profound implications of these results. (shrink)

Many experiments have shown that quantum entanglement is physically real. In this paper, we will discuss its ontological origin, implications and applications by thinking outside the standard interpretations of quantum mechanics. We argue that quantum entanglement originates from the primordial spin processes in non-spatial and non-temporal pre-spacetime, implies genuine interconnectedness and inseparableness of once interacting quantum entities, plays vital roles in biology and consciousness and, once better understood and harnessed, has far-reaching consequences and applications in many fields such as medicine (...) and neuroscience. We further argue that quantum computation power also originates from the primordial spin processes in pre-spacetime. Finally, we discuss the roles of quantum entanglement in spin-mediated consciousness theory. (shrink)