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Illustration by Wenting Li

Thesis

Where Does Consciousness Live?

One scientist's research on anesthetics might help find the answer

By Mifi Purvis, '93 BA

June 23, 2018 •

What makes you, you? It's one of those questions that consume philosophers and blow the minds of first-year students. More than 300 years ago, René Descartes postulated that even if all else around him were illusory, the fact that he was noodling on it must mean that, at bare minimum, he could ponder. I think, therefore I am.

But what even is you? Is our consciousness, the seat of self, the thing that makes us who we are?

"As far as the sense of self and consciousness, that's somewhat controversial and, to be quite honest, I almost treat it as a hobby," says physics professor Jack Tuszynski, who holds the Allard Chair in Experimental Oncology in the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry. In his spare time, he is popping the hood on human consciousness to find out where it lies physically.

Where his job and his hobby intersect are the polymers called microtubules that exist in each of our cells. They provide structural stability and act as conduits among various parts of the cell-a kind of road along which motor proteins move cellular material. Tuszynski's team has demonstrated that microtubules also conduct electricity. They grow or shrink and participate in the movement of the mighty mitochondria, the generators of the cell. And microtubules are involved in cell division, a process that, run amok, is the hallmark of cancer.

On the hobby side of things, he is looking at quantum behaviour, the odd behaviour of microtubules at the atomic or subatomic level. "At least parts of their interaction could be at the quantum level," he says. He points to anesthesia as evidence.

Despite 150 years of using anesthesia, we don't have a good understanding of how it flips the switch that turns us off. Tuszynski might be getting there. "We've done some studies trying to find out if anesthetic molecules bind to proteins in microtubules-they do. In the absence of anesthetic molecules in the microtubules, consciousness comes back." He says anesthetics shift the frequency of the jiggling proteins in microtubules, slowing them down.

If, as Tuszynski believes, he has found the physical seat of consciousness, the place in each cell where you live, it makes consciousness a field of scientific inquiry rather than strictly in the domain of philosophy or religion.

"Being a physicist, I try to understand it at the most fundamental level. I stay away from philosophy," Tuszynski says. "I'm not trained to deal with it."

Nathan Kowalsky, '98 BA(Hons), is trained to deal with it. He is a professor of philosophy and faculty member in the U of A's Faculty of Arts multidisciplinary Science, Technology and Society program.

"It's common to think of us as removable from our physical selves," he says. Even the divide between mental and physical health demonstrates our inclination to imagine our brains as things apart from our bodies. As if a living brain in a vat could somehow still be us.

"We are always being in our relation to other things," says Kowalsky, who specializes in environmental philosophy. "To understand our humanity we must understand ourselves as situated in a place. Cut off, we lose part of ourselves. We are a composite and we cannot divorce ourselves from our actions and interactions."

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