Book review of Stuart Hameroff

Stuart Hameroff:
ULTIMATE COMPUTING: BIOMOLECULAR CONSCIOUSNESS AND NANOTECHNOLOGy (Elsevier Science, 1987)

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The American anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff wrote a book that ultimately deals with the co-evolution of consciousness and technology, but specifically it highlights one structure of living cells that had been previously neglected. Hameroff thinks that the cytoskeleton is more than just the structural skeleton of the cell. Given the complex operations performed by a living cell (such as cell growth, mitosis and transport), Hameroff believes that the cell needs its own nervous system, and that the cytoskeleton performs precisely that function. Most of the book provides detailed explanations of the mechanisms observed in brain cells, in particular relating them to their evolutionary advantage. The rest mostly presents computational mechanisms, often related to the parallel distributed processing of connectionist models, that Hameroff suggest as hypotheses for cytoskeletal computing. Hameroff shows how physical models from holorams to solitons can be used to model the physics of the brain. Hameroff also believes that the roots of consciousness itself are in the cytoskeleton. See: QUANTUM COMPUTING IN MICROTUBULES - AN INTRA-NEURAL CORRELATE OF CONSCIOUSNESS?
Roger Penrose will start from here to develop his own theory of consciousness.

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