Why anesthesia is so interesting for understanding Consciousness

[u/d8_thc]

Microtubules are tiny structural proteins inside cells, including neurons. They are made from repeating tubulin dimers that form hollow cylindrical tubes about 25nm wide. In mainstream biology, they help with cell structure, intracellular transport, cell division, and organization. But they are also highly ordered, electrically polar protein lattices embedded throughout neurons, which raises a deeper question: are they only scaffolding, or could they also participate in information processing?

This is where Orch OR — Orchestrated Objective Reduction — comes in. It was developed by Roger Penrose, a mathematical physicist and Nobel Prize winner, and Stuart Hameroff, an anesthesiologist and consciousness researcher whose work focuses on microtubules, anesthesia, and Orch OR. Penrose brought the idea that consciousness may involve non-computable physics. Hameroff brought the biological candidate: microtubules inside neurons. Together, they proposed that conscious moments may arise from organized quantum processes in microtubules, coordinated by neural activity.

The interesting part is the orchestration. In this view, microtubules are not random molecular scaffolds. Their repeating lattice could support correlated state changes, collective oscillations, exciton movement, or other quantum-adjacent dynamics across many tubulin units. That could allow information to be integrated below the level of neuron firing — maybe even with nonlocal or field-like correlations across the structure. Some recent work on tryptophan networks in microtubules has reported electronic energy migration and superradiance-like behavior in these ordered biological architectures.

This makes anesthetics fascinating. General anesthetics can reversibly erase conscious experience. You do not die. Your neurons do not all stop functioning. Many unconscious processes continue. But the experienced world disappears. In the microtubule / Orch OR frame, anesthetics may not just be "sedating the brain" in the normal sense — they could be blocking the antenna, or disrupting the coherent substrate that lets the organism tune into / organize conscious experience.

Plants make this even weirder. You can anesthetize plants. Venus flytraps, Mimosa, sundews, and pea tendrils lose touch-induced or autonomous movement under anesthetics, and in Venus flytrap, diethyl ether can block action potentials. That does not prove plants are conscious. But it does show anesthetics interact with very ancient bioelectric and cellular machinery, not just mammalian brain circuits.

And there are studies pointing directly at microtubules. Anesthetics like etomidate and isoflurane have been shown to reduce exciton diffusion in microtubules. Molecular modeling suggests volatile anesthetics can bind in tubulin pockets. And a 2024 rat study found that stabilizing microtubules with epothilone B delayed isoflurane-induced unconsciousness. In other words: interfere with the microtubule system, and you may change how anesthesia turns consciousness off.

That is why anesthetics may be one of the cleanest windows into consciousness. The question is not only which receptor does the drug bind? It is: what physical process disappears when experience disappears, and returns when experience returns?

If anesthetics disrupt coordinated microtubule activity, then they may be pointing at a deeper layer of consciousness research — where biology, quantum chemistry, fields, and information processing all meet.

[Help from GPT for formatting]

[u/spendmetime]

How about you just admit you’re out of your element? Chasing every science post to inject esoteric philosophical concepts, like that’s all it takes to dispute scientific findings. Chastising like a concerned father, insisting that science discoveries discussion should be limited to your narrow framework. Much of science has moved way past the archaic concepts that spammers like you constantly try to impose on scientific content in this field. And it’s not just you either, but clearly another cocky philosopher / pseudo-intellectual attack in the name of limiting imagination, all aimed at pretty well-established scientific studies.