In Great Britain it is customary to give outstanding compatriots the knight title and the title of sir. One of the lucky owners of these regalia is the largest mathematician and theoretical physicist Roger Penrose.
For more than ten years now, he fearlessly, openly and honestly, like a real knight, has been attacking one of the greatest secrets of nature - the secret of reason. His latest developments in the field of quantum theory of consciousness suggest the existence of life after death.
Mind chamber
By the power of thought and giftedness, many people compare Roger Penrose not with anyone, but with Einstein himself: what he does in physics and mathematics is just as incredible and brilliant. And it's not so much about theories or discoveries. Penrose offers something like a new way of knowing - not from the particular to the whole, as science has been operating for several centuries in a row, but on the contrary - from the whole to the particular. Perhaps this approach allowed Penrose to make a huge revolution in science.
However, Roger Penrose is not just an icon for scientists. For true fans of telepathy, teleportation, clairvoyance, life after death and other "paranormalists" Penrose is the ultimate truth, magnitude, guru. No, he himself does not work in these areas, but his discoveries have allowed other scientists to look beyond the horizon - where human thought has not yet reached.
Scientists nowadays tend to think that consciousness arises from the multitude of calculations that the brain does. And if so, then they naturally compare our brain with a computer - the same as traditional computers, though significantly inferior to them in power.
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Penrose has his own point of view on this matter. He proves that there are certain areas, tasks, issues that no one of the most powerful supercomputers can ever cope with. But the brain can handle any tasks. That is, our brain is much more powerful than any computer. Penrose calls this amazing quality non-computational brain activity.
Remember how in the famous Soviet film "Teens in the Universe" the guys, when faced with representatives of an extraterrestrial civilization - robots, ask them a simple childish riddle-joke: "A and B sat on a pipe, A fell, B disappeared, what was left on the pipe?" A simple question that requires not programmed knowledge, but ordinary human ingenuity, plunges robots into bewilderment.
Shot from the film "Teens in the Universe" (1975)
They cannot withstand stress, begin to smoke like stoves, and eventually burn out to the ground. This example, of course, is a little far-fetched, but it reflects the position that Roger Penrose insists on: the human brain can cope with any task, even one that will baffle the most powerful supercomputer.
What is a soul?
Before coming to this conclusion, the scientist had to rely on something. Its pillar was the quantum theory of consciousness. How he came to it is the tenth thing, interesting, perhaps, only to very narrow specialists in the field of theoretical physics.
The starting point was the fundamental contradictions between Einstein's theory of relativity and some of the provisions of quantum physics. As a result of complex inferences, this conflict between the two greatest achievements in the history of science brought the scientist … to the principles of the brain, more precisely, to its quantum nature.
No, Penrose never spoke of telepathy, or what the soul is, or the universal mind, or life after death. Others did it for him, in particular his colleague Stuart Hameroff - professor of anesthesiology and psychology at the University of Arizona, as well as director of the Center for the Study of Consciousness.
Hameroff developed Penrose's ideas in his own way. In his opinion, the human brain is a natural quantum computer, consciousness is its software, and the soul is information accumulated at the quantum level.
And now - to the delight of "paranormalists" - great news: quantum information is not destroyed. If so, after the death of the body, information merges with the Universe, where it can exist for an infinitely long time. According to the theory of the American anesthesiologist, the human soul is immortal, and the afterlife exists. He calls people "quantum computers", the main program of which is consciousness.
After death, the quantum particles that make up the soul leave the body and go into space, forever becoming a part of the Universe, according to Stuart Hameroff. “I think that consciousness, or what preceded it, has always existed in the universe. Perhaps since the Big Bang,”says Hameroff.
The phenomenon of life after death, according to Hameroff, is quite explainable from the point of view of science. If the patient is resurrected, then the soul returns from space with corresponding memories. Therefore, a person who has experienced clinical death talks about the tunnel, bright light and how he left his body.
How Roger Penrose himself relates to such revelations of Hameroff is unknown. In any case, he never commented on Hameroff's conclusions. But the fact that one scientist continued the thoughts of another is beyond doubt.
One crucial detail was missing from Penrose's theory: the bearer of quantum consciousness. The one that should be the basis of a quantum computer. Hameroff made up for the missing link, taking as a basis microtubules located inside neurons - intracellular protein structures.
Back in 1987, in one of his books, he suggested that microtubules were clearly underestimated by science. That microtubules in a cell are used not only as "rails" for transporting particles - they, and not neurons, accumulate and process information.