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Comment by johndunne | Hacker News Reader

Can anyone recommend a good book on the subject of microtubules and consciousness?

It's a highly speculative subject, but one source is Roger Penrose's book from the early 90's: "The Emperor's New Mind". Not sure if that's where the hypothesis originated about quantum mechanics and microtubules... I think there's another work by Bohm and the guy who invented holograms that predates Penrose's thinking (but doesn't mention microtubules).

Penrose speculated about the source, but was Stuart Hameroff that brought the idea it could be the tubules to Penrose's attention. Hameroff thought anesthesia nerfed the tubules properties, which then caused loss of consciousness.

Then there's the recent articles on how the tubes might be able to entangle signals, which was from experimental research on meta materials.

I realize all of this is speculative at this point, and nobody is trying to say YES this is how it works. It's simply exploring one possibility, in a positive way, that allows us to think further outside the box.

It’s a very interesting hypothesis. And I guess research is difficult given the size of these structures and lack of tools available to monitor them with a high level of granularity.

Makes me think of this discussion which is going on right now

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41694025

Since it's not a good idea, I'd dispute the idea that there are any properly good books about it. It's Roger Penrose's idea, though—he calls it "orchestrated objective reduction" [1]—and his main book about it is called Shadows of the Mind.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reducti...

This is all very new science. No one has written the kind of book you are talking about yet. There have been theories about the quantum nature of of consciousness for a while but the microtubule theory is pretty new.

Is it really that new? Hameroff and Penrose have been making wild claims about microtubules since at least 1996: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/037847...

As suggested in another comment: Shadows of the Mind" by Roger Penrose in his chapter Quantum theory and the brain*.

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