Roger Penrose and the theory of consciousness

Famously, consciousness is often explained today as the emergent property of the computations performed by neurons and in stark contrast, the Penrose camp holds that consciousness is not computable and may instead emerge from the quantum processing somewhere in the brain. His main argument comes from the fact that the collapse of wave functions from superpositions is not computable. In other words, we cannot compute whether Schrödinger’s cat is dead or alive before we open the box and by the same token we cannot compute consciousness until some elementary part of it emerges from the collapse of the wave function present within the brain. This proposition is known as the orchestrated objective reduction, or Orch OR.

However, there are certain glaring holes in Orch OR, which Penrose is perfectly aware of, including the postulate that quantum effects and the wave-function collapse are non-computable, although we don’t know if this is true. The second criticism is the substrate of the quantum effects, in other words, in which part of the brain do these effects take place? Surely we didn’t miss tiny quantum computers in the cortex, did we? In conclusion, the jury is still out on whether Penrose’s ideas about the brain are true, but it will take a lot of effort to answer that question.