Farhan Lakhany

While most agree that biological organisms have evolved and their evolution can be understood in Darwinian terms, there is disagreement as to what caused the evolutionary change. In The Quantum Origin of Life: How the Brain Evolved to Feel Good, Stuart Hameroff argues that consciousness is the primary driver of that change. By appealing to his and Sir Roger Penrose's Orch-OR (orchestrated objective reduction) theory of consciousness, on which protoconscious experience and Platonic values are embedded in the fine structure of spacetime geometry, Hameroff articulates an ambitious thesis that inverts modern scientific approaches that understand consciousness as an epiphenomenon. Instead, he argues that OR (objective reduction) events cause protoconscious feelings and a subset of those (those which resonate with specific hedonic Platonic values) are pleasurable feelings. Those pleasurable feelings act as a feedback loop that drives molecular self-organization and serves as a driver of evolution: this is the quantum pleasure principle. This view has a certain intuitive appeal, proposing a unified account of action: while organisms act to secure pleasurable experiences, molecular systems, on Hameroff's picture, would self-organize in ways that promote the production of pleasurable protoconscious events. That said, I argue the theory runs into three significant philosophical problems: first, it makes a category mistake by attributing agential states to non-agential systems; second, it fails to explain how systems with these agential states use those states to drive behavior; and third, it gives rise to an interaction problem insofar as it leaves mysterious how geometric structures resonate with non-physical Platonic values. After articulating the three problems, I provide three possible responses on Hameroff's behalf. Against the first, he might argue against the ascription of agential states to the system or argue against the claim that molecules are non-agential systems. To the second he might claim that I am unnecessarily overcomplicating his account by introducing a system that needs to intervene to give the hedonic state some causal efficacy. Against the third, he might claim that he has a way of naturalizing Platonic values. Alternatively, he might argue dialectically that this is not a significant issue because all accounts which make consciousness central will need to explain interaction with the non-physical; given that we have strong reason for thinking interaction is true (even if we do not know how), this issue should not lead us to doubt the view. I argue against each of these responses and conclude that the quantum pleasure principle does not survive scrutiny and that the broader project of grounding evolution in Orch-OR consciousness faces serious obstacles.