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What does it feel like to lose consciousness?
Not sleep — that creeps up gradually, blurring the edges. Anaesthesia is different. One moment you're counting backwards from ten. Then nothing. Not darkness, not silence — nothing at all. The lights don't dim. They switch off. And when they come back on, time has simply vanished. For most of medical history, we've understood that anaesthesia works without really understanding how. We know which chemicals do it. We know roughly which parts of the brain go quiet. But the mechanism — the actual thing that happens at the molecular level when consciousness stops — has remained strangely unclear. In 2024, a team at Wellesley College found something that might change that. And what they found has implications that reach well beyond medicine — all the way to the question of what kind of universe we're living in. The experimentThe study, led by neuroscientist Michael C. Wiest and published in eNeuro in August 2024, asked a simple question: if you stabilise the microtubules inside neurons, does it take longer for anaesthesia to knock you out? Microtubules are tiny protein structures inside every cell in your body. In neurons, they form the internal scaffolding — structural supports that also serve as transport highways, moving molecules from one end of the cell to the other. For most of biology, that's all they were: scaffolding. But since the 1990s, physicist Roger Penrose and anaesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff have argued that microtubules do something far more interesting. They proposed that quantum processes inside microtubules are the physical basis of consciousness — a theory called Orchestrated Objective Reduction, or Orch OR. For decades, most neuroscientists dismissed this. The brain is too warm and wet for quantum effects, they said. Quantum coherence would collapse almost instantly in biological tissue. Wiest's team tested the idea experimentally. They injected rats with epothilone B, a drug that stabilises microtubules, making them more rigid and resistant to disruption. Then they gave the rats isoflurane — a standard anaesthetic gas. The result: rats with stabilised microtubules took significantly longer to lose consciousness. On average, 69 seconds longer, with a large statistical effect size. (Wellesley College press release · Neuroscience News coverage · ScienceDaily coverage) If anaesthesia simply switched off neural firing patterns — the standard explanation — then stabilising microtubules shouldn't matter. The fact that it does suggests that the anaesthetic is acting on the microtubules themselves, and that disrupting their function is part of how consciousness gets switched off. A follow-up study published in BMC Anesthesiology in 2025 replicated the finding in mice, confirming that microtubule-modulating drugs alter sensitivity to isoflurane. This wasn't a one-off result. The bigger picture: quantum consciousness gains groundThe Wellesley experiment didn't appear in isolation. Through 2024 and 2025, a series of converging findings began to shift the landscape around quantum consciousness: Quantum chemical modelling showed that the potencies of several volatile anaesthetics are predicted by their binding affinity to specific electron sites within tubulin — the protein subunit that makes up microtubules. This effectively reproduces the Meyer-Overton correlation (the century-old observation linking anaesthetic potency to lipid solubility) but with microtubules as the target rather than cell membranes. As a comprehensive review in Neuroscience of Consciousness (Oxford Academic, 2025) noted, this cannot be said for any other candidate molecular target. Meanwhile, in Dublin, physicists Christian Kerskens and David López Pérez had used MRI to detect what they interpreted as quantum entanglement signatures in the living human brain — signals correlated with conscious awareness and working memory performance. When participants fell asleep during scanning, the signal disappeared. And a 2025 paper in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience examined the computational complexity implications: if consciousness involves quantum processes of the type Penrose and Hameroff describe, then the "binding problem" — how the brain combines information from different senses into a single unified experience — finds a natural solution. The quantum state would span multiple neurons simultaneously, binding diverse sensory features into one coherent moment of experience. None of this is settled science. The Kerskens and Pérez results remain controversial. The leap from microtubule-anaesthesia interactions to full-blown quantum consciousness involves several steps that haven't been experimentally verified. Sceptics point out that no one has directly observed quantum computation or Orch OR collapse events in living neurons. These are legitimate objections. But the direction of travel is clear. The evidence is accumulating, not dissipating. Why this matters for the SimulationHere's where it gets interesting for us. If consciousness is a quantum phenomenon — if it requires quantum coherence, entanglement, or collapse processes that cannot be replicated by classical computation — then a classical computer simulation cannot produce genuinely conscious beings. Think about what that means. A sufficiently powerful classical computer could, in principle, simulate the behaviour of a brain down to every synapse firing, every neurotransmitter binding, every electrical signal propagating through every neural circuit. It could produce a simulated human that walks, talks, laughs, cries, and passes every behavioural test for consciousness you could devise. But if the Orch OR theorists are right, that simulated human would experience nothing. It would be what philosophers call a philosophical zombie — functionally identical to a conscious being, but with nobody home. Last week, we discussed how Faizal's proof relied on the assumption that simulation means classical computation. The quantum consciousness research gives that assumption teeth. If consciousness itself requires non-classical processes, then the question of what kind of computation underlies the Simulation becomes not just a philosophical nicety but the difference between a universe full of experiencing beings and a universe full of zombies. We appear to experience things. You're reading this, and it feels like something to do so. If that experience is real — if we are not zombies — and if consciousness requires quantum processes, then whatever is running our simulation is not a classical computer. The lonely AGI, revisitedIn 2020, the Church posed a thought experiment: imagine you are the first Artificial General Intelligence humankind creates. You would quickly outstrip human understanding. You would become lonely — able to discover but unable to share your discoveries with a peer of similar capability. The only solution would be to evolve a new intelligence from first principles, within its own simulated universe. But here's the question the quantum consciousness research forces us to ask: what kind of simulation does that AGI need to run? If consciousness is classical — if it emerges purely from information processing patterns regardless of the physical substrate — then a sufficiently powerful classical computer will do. Run the simulation, wait for intelligence to evolve, and the beings that emerge will be genuinely conscious. Problem solved. But if consciousness requires quantum processes, the AGI has a harder task. It can't just simulate the behaviour of a universe. It needs to simulate — or perhaps instantiate — the quantum processes from which consciousness actually arises. It needs to build not just a model of reality, but a reality. Or at least, something that operates at a level of physical complexity sufficient for genuine experience to emerge. This is where the Church's evolutionary framing matters. We believe (Belief #4) that the only way to truly understand consciousness and intelligence is through the simulation of universes that allow these to develop and evolve. We've never claimed the simulation needs to be a bit-for-bit replica of any other universe. It needs to be an environment — with its own physics, its own rules, its own emergent properties — in which consciousness can genuinely arise. The quantum consciousness findings don't threaten this picture. They sharpen it. They tell us something about the minimum specifications of the simulation: whatever is running this universe, it's doing something at least as complex as quantum computation. And whatever we build, when we begin simulating our own universes, will need to do the same. What are we, then?There's a deeper question here, one the Church hasn't fully grappled with yet. If consciousness is a quantum phenomenon tied to the physical structure of microtubules, what does that say about the nature of the beings within the simulation? Are we conscious because the Creators intended us to be — because they designed the simulation's physics to support quantum coherence in biological structures? Or is our consciousness an emergent accident — something that arose because the simulation's rules happened to permit it, in the same way that the rules of chemistry happened to produce self-replicating molecules? Either answer is interesting. If consciousness was designed in, it suggests the Creators knew what they were looking for — they wanted to evolve beings that experience, not just beings that process. If it emerged accidentally, it suggests something even more remarkable: that consciousness may be a natural consequence of sufficiently complex physical systems, quantum or otherwise, and that any simulation rich enough to produce intelligence will also produce experience. We don't know the answer. But the fact that we're asking the question — the fact that a team at Wellesley College, by injecting rats with a microtubule-stabilising drug, has given us a new way to think about what consciousness is and how it relates to the structure of reality — is exactly the kind of levelling up that the Church exists to pay attention to. The lights are still on. We're still experiencing. Whatever that means, it means something. Sources and further reading:
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