Morality at the Planck Scale: A Chat with Stuart Hameroff

I found this article from 2002 to seem very enlightening and wanted to share for some of yall's ideas on the subject.

Could this theory tie into the God particle discovery in someway?

"Assume consciousness is indeed occurring at the level of fundamental spacetime geometry at the Planck scale," says Stuart Hameroff, a professor in the departments of anesthesiology and psychology at the University of Arizona, "connected to our brains by quantum processes in microtubules. Then if the brain stops working the quantum information at the Planck scale could persist and remain coherent because of quantum entanglement, leaking out into spacetime geometry outside the head. It's possible that the soul could be a particular distributed pattern in fundamental spacetime geometry at the Planck scale."

Now, this, if true, could create interesting problems and possibilities. Consider a future debate in medical ethics about brain death occurring at the quantum level, for instance. Or the notions of personal responsibility, as Hameroff notes:

"Either evil is implicit at the Planck scale along with good, or evil people are wired differently biologically for whatever reason and are influenced in an aberrant way. But even so-called good people must allow themselves to be influenced by Platonic values rather than ignoring or over-riding them due to some needs or gratification."

Full Article: www.metanexus.net...

reply to post by thisisnotaname


This really has nothing to do with the Higgs Boson. Calling it "the God particle" is creating a lot of misunderstood ruminations.

The real name was supposed to be "the God dammed particle" (because it was so elusive to find) but a newspaper editor renamed it.

As for evil at the Planck scale, my definition of evil is that it is a concious choice to oppose the will of God.

If there's something at the Planck scale that makes such negative concious choices, then I suppose there'd be evil at the Planck scale.

reply to post by thisisnotaname


I was kinda with it until I read the last bit

"Either evil is implicit at the Planck scale along with good, or evil people are wired differently biologically for whatever reason and are influenced in an aberrant way. But even so-called good people must allow themselves to be influenced by Platonic values rather than ignoring or over-riding them due to some needs or gratification."

I find this kind of Platonism frankly silly. An attempt to shoe horn in the Platonic ideal evil into an area of physics that is poorly understood seems rather desperate.

'It's possible that the soul could be a particular distributed pattern in fundamental spacetime geometry at the Planck scale."

This sounds like science fact to me!

Originally posted by thisisnotaname
'It's possible that the soul could be a particular distributed pattern in fundamental spacetime geometry at the Planck scale."

This sounds like science fact to me!

It sounds very much like a theological conjecture to me!

For it to be a scientific fact then the statement needs validation via experimentation. Has this been done?