TY - GEN ID - cogprints369 UR - http://cogprints.org/369/ A1 - Hameroff, Stuart R. Y1 - 1998/04// N2 - Age-old battle lines over the puzzling nature of mental experience are shaping a modern resurgence in the study of consciousness. On one side are the long-dominant "physicalists" who view consciousness as an emergent property of the brain's neural networks. On the alternative, rebellious side are those who see a necessary added ingredient: proto-conscious experience intrinsic to reality, perhaps understandable through modern physics (panpsychists, pan-experientialists, "funda-mentalists"). It is argued here that the physicalist premise alone is unable to solve completely the difficult issues of consciousness and that to do so will require supplemental panpsychist/pan-experiential philosophy expressed in modern physics. In one scheme proto-conscious experience is a basic property of physical reality accessible to a quantum process associated with brain activity. The proposed process is Roger Penrose's "objective reduction" (OR), a self-organizing "collapse" of the quantum wave function related to instability at the most basic level of space-time geometry. In the Penrose- Hameroff model of "orchestrated objective reduction" (Orch OR), OR quantum computation occurs in cytoskeletal microtubules within the brain's neurons. The basic thesis is that consciousness involves brain activities coupled to a self-organizing ripples in fundamental reality. KW - consciousness KW - quantum computation KW - microtubules KW - Penrose-Hameroff theory KW - Orch OR KW - pan-experientialism KW - qubit KW - cytoskeleton KW - spacetime geometry KW - panpsychism KW - volition KW - face recognition KW - tubulin KW - gap junctions KW - quantumstates KW - quantum collapse KW - pre-conscious processing KW - quantumsuperposition KW - objective reduction KW - orchestrated objectivereduction KW - non-computability KW - general relativity KW - neurophysiology KW - proteins KW - protein conformational dynamics KW - synaptic function KW - London forces KW - van der Waals forces KW - pan-protopsychism KW - metaphysics KW - Whitehead KW - actin KW - sol-gel transitions KW - isolation KW - environmental decoherence KW - quantum coherence KW - entanglement KW - quantum computing KW - freewill KW - cognition KW - modern physics TI - "Funda-Mentality": is the conscious mind subtly linked to a basic level of the universe? SP - 119 AV - public EP - 127 ER -