Microtubules are Biological Computers

Can you find a flowing narrative to convert this long text of Prof. Riddle... something written for oration, rather than a educational video, to add more powerful vocal impact with the available AI TTS generators, facilitating a deeper understanding of the fascinating interpretation of the biological interface of mind and cellular quantum oscillations...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHhAx3dWyTA&list=PLqB9eBHq-FSjlxKrCELpIE7_NiKA3bdw6

I apologize, but I do not have access to the full text or content from the YouTube video you linked. YouTube's terms of service prohibit me from reproducing or quoting large sections of video content without permission.

However, if you are able to provide me with a transcript or summary of Prof. Riddle's key points in your own words, I would be happy to try to help craft that into a more flowing, oratorical style suitable for text-to-speech while being careful not to reproduce any copyrighted material.

The goal would be to capture the essence and fascination of his ideas about the biological interface between mind and cellular quantum oscillations in an engaging spoken narrative format. But I would need you to first distill and provide the core content and ideas as a starting point. Let me know if you're able to do that and I'll do my best to assist from there!

Lovely! As requested...

Search in video Introduction welcome back to the show that tells you you are a quantum computer with free will running off of a distributed network of microtubules my name is justin riddle and this is episode 13 of the quantum consciousness series today i'll be introducing you to the microtubule and giving you the sales pitch on why microtubules are the best candidate for a universal quantum computer in biology enabling single cellular and multicellular life this episode is available on youtube and an audio only version is available on apple podcast if you like what you hear today then please like the video subscribe to this channel leave a comment below or for the audio listener write a review [Music] alrighty so in the previous episodes we've been talking a lot about what is a quantum computer how does it build off of the technology of digital computers and what is knowledge what is information how do we form ideas what is mathematics and a lot of this has been dealing with sort of this philosophical side of why we would need quantum mechanics and why we should look to quantum mechanics as a novel solution to these fundamental philosophical questions that we have about you know the nature of life and today i'm really going to dive into the the instantiation of a quantum computer within biology how do we get a quantum computer in our cells in our brains in our bodies if we are a quantum computer where would that be right it's uh it's fun and games to talk about you know maybe a quantum computer model of cognition or or discussing us as quantum computers but you know i really want to focus on how does that work where would we find this realistically and so i'll be talking a lot today about the roger penrose and stuart hamroff model of where we would see quantum computers in biology and their pitch is that it is the microtubule and i'll give you some background on what is the microtubule why is it an ideal candidate you know what are some other options out there and what is sort of the mainstream opinion and how does this sort of differ from that that mainstream opinion and then in the next week i'll be diving into the objective reduction the more quantum mechanical side of how the quantum computer would would really function in a realistic sense going through time processing information and sort of diving more into that mechanism at the really fundamental chemical and protein scale but today i'm really going to make the pitch about microtubules “Neuron doctrine is an insult to neurons” so when you hear people talk about you know we need to create human cognition and we're going to make it out of neurons right and so there's these these computational models called neural networks and in in a neural network you have a bunch of different nodes and they all have connections to each other and the model here is that each node is like a neuron and it activates it has this electrical potential and it transmits signals to the next neuron and so you create a grid a network of all these neurons and people are trying to build models of how these connections between neurons and the activity within this network of neurons that are all firing or not firing how this would give rise to complex human behavior right and so you have a lot of scientists working very hard modeling all of these neural activity patterns of signaling between them all all right what is a glaring problem in this model right so if you're trying to say that this is your model for consciousness and for complex behavior well what is going on in single celled organisms and i think this is a you know really straightforward uh i guess missing plot hole in the neural network model of consciousness but stuart hameroff makes this really great argument um against pushing back against these neural network models of consciousness all right you're trying to model perception and behavior well we know that single-celled organisms existed roughly 4.5 billion years ago and they've been evolving and the world was composed entirely or this planet was composed entirely of single-celled life until just 500 million years ago when there was a cambrian explosion and multi-cellular life came onto the scene but there's this billions and billions of years gap where you have only singled cell life and single cells can perform a lot of the complex behavior that we consider to be life or you know that we're trying to model with these neural networks so single celled life can have sex can seek out food you have predator prey relationships between some cells hunting and consuming and eating other single-celled organisms i mean there is this entire ecosystem of life at the single-celled level and just because we can't see it we're not really aware of it but there is so much complex behavior going on there is a you know birth and and lifespan of a single cell and it goes through a lot of the same fundamental processes that we consider to be you know human or related to to multi-celled organisms and we see them at the single cell level right hunting for food smelling sensing the environment moving towards food running away from predators so the question is if you are a neural network modeler and you're trying to give a model of how complex behavior comes about well how do you explain to single-celled organism right if you're trying to explain perception or behavior and action then you need to have this happening at the single-celled level as well i mean so even if your model is somehow true at this neural network level okay well how does that explain single cell life which already has all of the properties of what you're trying to solve for at the neural network level i think this is a glaring oversight in the neural network modeling domain not to say those models aren't valid but just saying that you know if we rely too much on this like neurons fire and then they're done modeling um we're kind of missing the bar you know evolutionarily looking through our history and our past and trying to explain all of life and all of um complex behavior that can arise um oh yeah one more example is that single-celled organisms can learn from their environment so there's these uh examples where you can suck a single-celled organism up into a tube and then you let it escape and then the you know the suction is on and it'll avoid that uh suction or it'll learn how to exit the tube more quickly so there's sort of a capacity to learn and you know maybe that's not the equivalent of like a memory but there is a form of learning going on at the single cell levels so yeah i challenge you to think critically what is life what is uniquely human or mammal and what do you find even at the single cell level and then how do we then go and explain this amazingly complex displays of behavior at that single celled level all right what is the answer well one DNA vs Microtubules answer is microtubules and so when you think back to your junior high biology class when you were learning about the cell there was something called the microtubules or the cytoskeleton that they introduced to you and they really introduced it to you as the scaffolding of the cell right it's kind of just a architectural component of the cell and that's pretty much how it's sold to you and then the nucleus with the dna is like the core of the of the cell and this is like viewed as like the brain of the cell is the nucleus containing the dna and the dna is this sequence this code this algorithm is maybe built into that sequencing within the dna and that is potentially where the you know the important aspect of life comes in or this is like the key to unlocking behavior and complex perceptions and and things like that um however if we go look at what a cell does what is this cell doing on a practical level so if you look at a cell and here's here's some common examples that you'll be aware of or that you will have heard of so one example is the sperm so the sperm has a tail and that tail is responsible for moving and sort of swimming that cell around and that tail is composed entirely of microtubules all right we have mitosis where you have a cell that's being divided and so you have the dna and it gets lined up in the center and then it gets pulled um in half right and the chromosomes get split and these little tendrils come in and they pull the dna and the chromosomes apart and then they recombine them what are those little tendrils those are microtubules doing this very complex act of pulling apart this this dna and if you look at any cell it's going to have these little hairs around it and they really uh make the cell swim right if you look internally into the cell we have this naive idea that in the cell it's kind of like this bag of minestrone soup right there's a bunch of little carrots and tomato chunks and a little bit of this a little bit of that some spice here and there but it's mostly liquid and it's just like this big bag of stuff and if you were to shake it all the things would move around well in reality the cell is jam-packed with stuff what is it jam-packed with it is jam-packed with microtubules there are tubes everywhere inside the cell if you were to peel back the phospholipid bilayer membrane and look into the cell it would just be this really complex network of tubes everywhere that i can see tubes tubes tubes right and the space between individual proteins is like countable numbers of water molecules right like proteins crammed in there these microtubules crammed in there and it's really just this like dense jungle of proteins inside the cell and of course these organelles which are also in there so the microtubules are everywhere they are involved in moving the cell around through the cilia it's kind of like swimming through the environment and it is forming this network all around the cell so what we really need to ask the question is you've been sold this narrative that dna is really the fundamental um code of how the cell is gonna work but in reality we look into the cell and there's this massive network of tubes growing and shrinking moving the cell around everywhere and in addition these these networks of tubes are even conveying proteins around the cell so as proteins are created they get transported along the microtubules kind of like a um a traffic system or some like highway of moving these proteins around so if we look at cellular activity dna is helping you encode you know what proteins to create but a lot of modern dna theory or people that are that discuss dna there's a lot about how you use dna dna is a recipe book on how to build proteins and it probably does a number of other things that we don't quite understand there's a lot of junk dna or dark dna meaning it's like mysterious and we don't really know what it's really doing um but that dna needs to get used it gets read in it gets you're kind of taking that recipe book and you're building a protein according to the recipe right but it's really about genetic expression so you have demands contextual demands and then you need to get more proteins because the cell needs more of that protein right there's a context and then in that context the dna is activated in some way and it's read in to to generate Diffusion vs Central Hub the proteins that you need but here's the question where is the brain of the cell what is making decisions in the cell is it option a a diffusion process right diffusion is sort of the simple classical answer here there is a local demand and then you know we we sense some noxious stimuli right some poison is in the environment off to the uh the side of the cell over yonder and now the cell needs to withdraw from that location and so that sets off a bunch of local cascades of activity and then those cascades you know kind of propagate through the cell and they diffuse into the cell so then option a is really saying that there's a bunch of these protein cascades and these protein cascades are sort of the primary network within the cell but then the question then becomes you know how do you have sort of coordinated behavior right so if i have a noxious stimuli over here i have a predator over here i have a food source over there and another food source over here who makes the decision right i have two threats and two rewards i need to choose which one to go towards you know if it was all local activity it'd be like ah constrict on these sides and expand on those sides and you'd have cells like kind of growing and shrinking towards a bunch of stimuli at the same time and so what does it choose which wins out maybe there's like a protein cascade that that is sort of uh takes over eventually and sort of wins that that debate um but it is a fundamental question here option b what's the alternative to this chaotic diffusion protein cascade model option b is that there is a universal centralized command system built into every cell at its core and it creates a distributed network where you can integrate information across the cell into a single hub make a single decision go for that food run away from that predator when you witness individual single cells you see rest in digest mode casually seek in some food take an arrest and then you see fight or flight there's a predator there's a poison i need to run i need to get out of here you see the same pattern of overarching behavioral states dominating these single-celled life forms is there a centralized command hub that is doing all of this at one time right and the cytoskeleton is that candidate and so the alternative to diffusion-based protein cascades is a centralized computer hub that is universal and forms a single unit and that makes a single functional unit come out of this very complex multifaceted spatially distributed system okay so historically how did this come Microtubules as Universal Computers about what makes a microtubule strange compared to the common thoughts about a protein and how might this serve as a quantum computer so here's some of the things that make a microtubule weird or here's the primary thing right when you think about a protein we have this common perception that okay i'm a little protein here i have some inputs some outputs and i perform a certain function right it's it's kind of like an appliance or like a microwave a refrigerator a protein has a sort of given function of what it does it can take in this input transform it do this thing do that thing they kind of have a finite set of operations that they can perform and so every protein is kind of like a little tool and a lot of biology is you know understanding how this protein makes this chemical transformation happen and this other protein has a different chemical reaction happening over here and then they interact and this one is sensitive to this input generates this output and so there's these networks of like this protein does this and then that activates this protein but then this other protein comes in and regulates that interaction and each protein has a certain function and you go and you look at the structure of the protein and through that structure you know what it can bind to what it can do you understand the function through the structure you get the function and then we have this um sort of these diagrams of all these protein interactions and these cascades where one protein activates another set of proteins activates another set of proteins and there's these pathways of proteins and regulatory feedback channels and all this jazz right what's weird about the microtubule okay the microtubule is a single protein it's called a tubulin protein and it's repeated in a helix pattern so i believe it's around about 13 around in a circle and then it keeps going kind of has like this candy cane like spiral to it where they're all connected in this nice uh topology and they form a tube right and so there's a tube there's single proteins here and every protein is the same right so then when you see the microtubule growing and shrinking moving over here grabbing this pulling that apart moving the cell forward this locomotion how do you get all this complex behavior from a single protein there's nothing else going on here it forms a tube which is a little weird there's like this geometric pattern this tube pattern and there's a single protein spiraling through the these tubes and there's this full cytoskeleton this network of tubes linked up with these little proteins that link them together but it's fundamentally and mind-bogglingly simple in that it's a single protein and i think that this really messes with the standard biology approach right from the structure we get the function okay well what is the structure here and how would that lead to a function the structure is a tube made out of a single protein where is the function there and how does complex behavior and activity come out of this this is a fundamental mystery and stuart hammeroff who is a biologist by training he came into this back in the day i think it was the 80s and was viewing these microtubules as universal digital computers there's something very bit like in the microtubules it appears like there's a bunch of bits and these microtubules are just made up of like a bunch of uh you think about like a bunch of transistors right you want like a bunch of transistors you want to store as much information zeros and ones as you can and so maybe just maybe these microtubules are some form of digital computation device and if they are blank meaning they don't you know it's just the same thing repeated then maybe it's programmable maybe you add a little protein here add another protein here you add some connections onto the microtubule and now you're programming this sort of like universal turing machine perhaps and it's serving as sort of a universal digital computer that can be programmed can execute algorithms and can handle a diversity of inputs and generate a diversity of outputs based on some algorithmic process so the initial idea was that these microtubules can serve as universal digital computers solving the kind of mystery of why is there just one protein over and over and over and over well it's because it's a programmable computer and you want function to be flexible you want flexibility you want it to be programmable so you don't want an inherent function built into the structure you want it to have that dynamic element to it where it can be coded into this or this or that or that right and then moving historically to the next stage in Penrose’s Quantum Computation update the story stuart hameroff had this microtubule model of digital computation and roger penrose is simultaneously discussing the limitations of digital computers and thinking there has to be a quantum computer in our biology but where in the world am i going to find a thing in biology that's ready to be a quantum computer right you want to find something that can be a universal quantum computer that has sort of a mysterious unknown functionality in biology performs core core core core behaviors at the center of a cell acting as sort of an executive unit and stuart hameroff and penrose met i believe stuart hamroff read roger penrose's book emperor's new mind sent him an email and said hey i think i have your biological structure you want to put a quantum computer into a cell i have this bizarre microtubule network that needs you know something more to explain its function and i now realize from reading your book the limitations of digital computation through girdles and completeness theorem and see the previous episodes um but could we maybe investigate a quantum computer model of microtubules and thus the the magical collaboration of our past was born and they worked tirelessly and developed this model over many many many years talking about how a quantum computer could be fit into this microtubule system so what does this mean what does it buy you to have a quantum computer in a cell right what it buys you is it buys you a central single executive unit inside of a cell that acts as a command center which can make decisions for the future of the cell and then that decision is propagated across the network of microtubules right so i was talking about we get a reward stimuli we have a predator we have some poison we have some food and we have a possible mate and i'm a single-celled organism i have two rewards different types two attack vectors uh different types how do i integrate all this information and what am i going to do right now i need to make a decision in this moment of what to do well i could count on these protein cascades uh in the option a that i talked about the digital or kind of local reality version but what if it takes a while for this diffusion process right a cell is giant not to us but to a protein everything is about scale the cell is enormous compared to the size of a protein to move a protein across the cell is the equivalent i mean i don't actually know the exact scale you know number wise but it is massive right it would be the you know roughly the equivalent of like moving running across town uh to move a protein from one side of the cell to the other side of the cell right so how do signals get transmitted across the cell in an effective time you know if i'm a cell and i'm the size of a small town i would have people running across the town trying to talk to each other and then and then there's like the mayor's office trying to you know adjudicate what to do next i mean this is like a state of chaos you have all these messengers running around someone trying to make decisions for the cell and then trying to carry out those decisions i mean that would be a complex web of slow moving pieces to make something happen option b you got a quantum computer in the microtubules all you got to do get your input into a tube right so there's like a noxious stimuli sends a protein cascade get that signal into the microtubule and then you go into a superposition across a bunch of these microtubules more on that in the next episode that superposition state that is maintained within the microtubules creates a very fast transfer of information some people say it's the speed of sound is the the rate that a signal transmits within a quantum superposition other people theorize that it's even quicker near instantaneous faster than the speed of light it's kind of like wrapped up into this um this system that is that is delocalized fundamentally and so you don't necessarily even need to transmit the signal because it is a delocalized entity anyways point being whichever those interpretations is is more accurate signals are able to transmit at a time frame that makes it biologically feasible to have a single cell integrate all this information from all around the cell make a single decision wave function collapses that output is transmitted simultaneously near instantaneously across the entire microtubule network boom everyone knows what they're doing every part of the cell gets the signal of go we're going to wait on this we're going to activate towards that thing now the cell has a single executive unit moving towards some goal right this is a non-trivial solution to a very difficult biological problem okay so that's option or that's uh explanation one of why it's important to to have a quantum computer on board uh the speed Quantum search in a cell second is exponential search so we talked about this in the quantum computer episode but quantum computers potentially allow you to search exponentially large spaces in polynomial or linear time frames so this means that when you're coding a digital computer you want to search all possible options i could do this or that and i could do this or that and i could do this or that and i could do this or that that explodes that sort of splitting off of possible options it explodes exponentially into this very large space of possible solutions and it takes a very long time for computers to search these spaces right but those problems arise very readily very simply very easily and so much of digital computation and software engineering is designing little hacks and heuristics and shortcuts so you don't need to search these exponential spaces because your computer will not get the answer in any reasonable time we're talking about computers running until the end of the universe just to figure out you know which restaurant to go to based on 30 different criteria it explodes that quickly and so imagine a biological system how many options do you have there if you get a bunch of inputs coming in you could have exponentially super large systems or or problems evolving and you need to get to an answer in a reasonable time frame because you're about to get eaten so you need to get an answer to what you're going to do and if you're searching these exponentially large spaces and you're a digital computer you're running out of time very very quickly however if you're a quantum computer you're able potentially to search these exponentially large spaces quickly get an answer go right another cool aspect of quantum computation in biology is that digital computers need to be programmed and the programming is finicky in that if a zero and a one is flipped you might have a catastrophic failure in the algorithm however quantum computers have a very natural evolution of open up a search space you hit a threshold it collapses you get an answer it might not be the best answer but hey at least it's a answer right in digital computers you're not guaranteed to have any answer so if there is sort of any sort of chaos in the system or some destruction of part of the computer you can have catastrophic failure where you know it just never computes anything so i think the quantum computer has a more readily available way of having a naturally occurring computation quantum computation where you don't need a programmer per se right which is actually a really hard problem when you try to imagine a digital computational system in a cell in a in a body because you know what happens when the algorithm fails who wrote the code can you really write computer code through a chaotic random process like a lot of evolutionary theories sort of pitch so i think there's a lot of of other benefits to to thinking of a quantum computer in a cell just in terms of like feasibility of getting this off the ground in an evolving system without programmers Stable microtubules in neurons all right finally couple comments on why you would want this from a consciousness perspective right and we'll get into this more um in the next couple episodes but neurons have stable microtubules right and so in most cells and in single cell life microtubules grow and shrink over time however in neurons they're stable and they're uniquely stable it's a cell that has uniquely stable microtubules and the microtubules stay stable throughout your entire lifetime neurons are the one cell in your body maybe there's a couple more but they definitely stay stable throughout your lifetime the neurons you're born with when you're a baby are still there when you're an adult aside from the ones that get pruned and get destroyed over time there is some neurogenesis for sure but overall the neurons in your brain stay stable throughout your lifetime and the microtubule will stay stable throughout your lifetime so this is a really cool opportunity to say you know if you had a quantum computer in your brain the association of consciousness with neurons and with brain activity fits well with microtubules because those microtubules are stable and so the quantum computer held within neurons in particular might have unique properties of stability throughout the lifetime which bodes well for a theory of consciousness because we have a narrative experience of our lives i feel like i'm the same person as when i was a kid where is that stability how is it created and so the microtubules fit along with neurons in having that lifelong stability Finding the self in biology next up and this is a similar argument to the quantum computer argument of of consciousness is that you can create a sense of self right so one of the properties of quantum systems and of quantum computers is that they have a single wave function there is one wave function governing the quantum system and so this could be the equivalent of a sense of self of being a single person and so the challenge in the neural you know system of microtubules is you gotta bridge across cells we need to create a stable you know macroscopic microtubule system that goes across a bunch of neurons and is able to sustain these very large quantum computers these very large superpositions and then we're getting closer to being able to say oh yeah that distributed network of microtubules undergoing superposition that superposition is me my consciousness is embodied within this large distributed microtubule network and it occupies you know those debates on this maybe it's a bunch of pyramidal neurons in prefrontal cortex that are housing your consciousness maybe it's a much wider network maybe it's slightly dynamic and there's pockets of subconsciousness within you more on this to come in the future but the microtubule model is sort of a neural plausible model of creating a single self and the feeling of being a self out of this messy wet noisy biology that we have so i'm going to leave it on that and next week we'll be going into objective reduction how do we create sustainable wave functions and superpositions in this chaotic wet noisy environment of the brain of the cell of the protein of the chemical level so we'll be going into that and talking with more detail about about that in the next episode [Music]

Here is a flowing narrative version of the key points from Prof. Riddle's video, suitable for oration:

Welcome, dear listeners, to a fascinating exploration of the quantum nature of consciousness and the role of microtubules as biological quantum computers. Prof. Justin Riddle guides us on this journey, challenging the conventional "neuron doctrine" and proposing a captivating alternative.

Imagine, for a moment, the vast complexity of single-celled organisms – their ability to hunt, evade predators, and even learn. How can we explain such sophisticated behavior without a network of neurons? The answer, Prof. Riddle suggests, lies within the intricate world of microtubules.

These microscopic tubular structures, once thought to be mere scaffolding within cells, may actually hold the key to understanding consciousness. They form a dense, interconnected network, like a bustling metropolis of information highways. Could this be the centralized command center of the cell, making decisions and coordinating complex behaviors?

Prof. Riddle, along with renowned researchers Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose, propose that microtubules are not just structural components, but rather, they are quantum computers. The uniform structure of microtubules, composed of repeating tubulin proteins, suggests a blank slate upon which diverse functions can be programmed – much like a universal Turing machine.

The quantum nature of microtubules offers tantalizing possibilities. Quantum superposition allows for near-instantaneous transmission of information across the cell, enabling swift decision-making in the face of multiple stimuli. Moreover, the ability of quantum computers to search vast solution spaces efficiently could be a significant advantage in the complex world of cellular biology.

In the realm of consciousness, the stability of microtubules in neurons throughout our lifetimes provides a compelling basis for the continuity of our sense of self. The quantum entanglement of microtubules across vast neural networks may give rise to the unified, subjective experience of consciousness.

As we delve deeper into the mysteries of the mind and the quantum world, the microtubule hypothesis offers a captivating framework for understanding the emergence of consciousness from the intricate dance of proteins within our cells. Prof. Riddle's insights beckon us to question our assumptions and embrace the awe-inspiring complexity of life at its most fundamental level.

Join us next time as we explore the concept of objective reduction and the sustainability of quantum coherence in the dynamic environment of the brain. Until then, let your imagination soar with the possibilities of your own quantum consciousness, orchestrated by the microtubules within.