Quantum Consciousness and the Origin of Life

Consciousness: it’s a mystery that has confounded philosophers, psychologists, and scientists throughout human history. Where does our first person sense of experience come from? One of the leading theories today comes from Stuart Hameroff, an anesthesiologist at the University of Arizona. Back in the 1990’s, he had a clandestine meeting with Nobel Prize-winning physicist Sir Roger Penrose, and together they came up with a profound – and controversial – new hypothesis that our brains construct conscious experience from quantum mechanical processes laced into the very fabric of the universe. Now 30 years later, evidence in favor of their theory is mounting thanks to incredible new findings by Director of the Arizona Astrobiology Center, Dante Lauretta, who also recently captained NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission. That mission collected pristine samples from an asteroid that dates to the dawn of the solar system, and inside they’ve found clues that the quantum nature of consciousness might have preceded the formation of life on Earth. Lauretta thinks that further study could solve another great scientific mystery: the origin of life.

Producer: Bryan Nelson
Editor: Bryan Nelson
Videographers: Danny Sax, Diana Cadena, Bryan Nelson
Animator: Sela Margalit Tweet