Conscious active inference II: Quantum orchestrated objective reduction among intraneuronal microtubules naturally accounts for discrete perceptual cycles

Hello, welcome everyone. This is Active Inference Guest Stream number 121.1 on September 23rd, 2025. We're with Mike Wiest, who will be presenting and then discussing OR on Neuronal MTs is the quantum substrate of conscious active inference. So Mike, thank you for joining. Looking forward to your presentation and to the questions people write in the live chat. So take it away, please. Thank you. Thank you, Daniel. Okay. So yeah, here's my title. What I'm going to try and convince you of is, so ORC-OR here stands for Orchestrated Objective Reduction. I'll explain what I'm talking about there and MTs are the microtubules. And so here's an outline. Uh-oh. There we go. Here's an outline of what I want to talk about. The second part here is the active inference proposal, but I want to start by talking about some evidence to make it plausible possible to you that microtubules may be the quantum substrate of consciousness. Before I go on to the specific active inference proposal, I'm going to mention, I don't think we'll have time to talk about this, but there's another paper I published recently, which addresses some of the more famous conceptual problems with regard to consciousness. I'm not sure if we'll get to those, but I'm happy to talk about those if we have time. But I figured for this venue, we want to focus on the active inference side of the story. And so before I start getting, diving into these details of experimental evidence I want to talk about, let me just summarize the overall proposal we're making with regard to active inference that I'm going to be building up to so that you don't lose the thread of what I'm trying to say. So this is our graphical abstract where I've kind of got two columns here and three rows. At the top is the most abstract level, the theory of active inference that describes optimal behavior of an agent in this mathematical formalism. There is a coarse functional mapping of that theory onto parts of the brain, including details like specific neuromodulators having specific functional roles in the active inference theory. So that match between neurophysiology and neuroanatomy and the theory supports that real brains do use active inference. But then the bottom part is about the implementation. So, so far, most active or all active inference process models, which attempt to say how neurons might implement active inference, this X at the bottom of the picture there by the classical neural implementation is meant to indicate that it seems or at least it has not been established that Hodgkin and Huxley based classical models, meaning classical models that incorporate the actual conductances that generate action potentials in neurons, have not established that those kinds of neurons, those kinds of models, can perform the necessary sophisticated mathematical operations fast enough to implement active inference in real time for, for like a sub-second decision-making and inference and motor control. The other side is our proposal saying that, you know, I want to emphasize that I'm accepting active inference as, at least the first approximation, a good description of what the brain does. What we're questioning is the implementation of it in terms of classical neurons and proposing instead that we have to, we have to resort to a quantum model of how neurons work and in particular taking into account quantum effects in microtubules inside neurons. So that's the overall proposal that essentially microtubules are going to implement conscious active inference. But before I come to the active inference part of the story, I want to, I want to convince you that there is at least evidence there's, uh, that microtubules may be the substrate of quantum consciousness. And I'll start with a, um, for the point of view of how anesthetics render us reversibly unconscious and a bit of experimental evidence from my lab. But so to, to introduce this part about anesthesia, here's a quote from, uh, Claude Bernard, one of…