Stuart Hameroff
| Stuart Hameroff | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
16 July 1947 Buffalo, New York, United States |
| Residence | Tucson, Arizona, United States |
| Citizenship | United States |
| Nationality | American |
| Fields | Anesthesiologist |
| Institutions | University of Arizona |
| Alma mater |
University of Pittsburgh (B.S.) Hahnemann University Hospital (M.D.) |
| Known for | Consciousness studies |
| Influences | Roger Penrose |
Stuart Hameroff (born July 16, 1947) is an anesthesiologist and professor at the University of Arizona known for his studies of consciousness.
Hameroff received his BS degree from the University of Pittsburgh and his MD degree from Hahnemann University Hospital, where he studied before it became part of the Drexel University College of Medicine. He took an internship at the Tucson Medical Center in 1973. From 1975 onwards, he has spent the whole of his career at the University of Arizona, becoming professor in the Department of Anesthesiology and Psychology and director for the Center for Consciousness Studies, both in 1999, and finally Emeritus professor for Anesthesiology and Psychology in 2003.
At the very beginning of Hameroff's career, while he was at Hahnemann, cancer-related research work piqued his interest in the part played by microtubules in cell division, and led him to speculate that they were controlled by some form of computing. It also suggested to him that part of the solution of the problem of consciousness might lie in understanding the operations of microtubules in brain cells, operations at the molecular and supramolecular level.
The operations of microtubules are remarkably complex and their role pervasive in cellular operations; these facts led to the speculation that computation sufficient for consciousness might somehow be occurring there. These ideas are discussed in Hameroff's first book Ultimate Computing (1987). The main substance of this book dealt with the scope for information processing in biological tissue and especially in microtubules and other parts of the cytoskeleton. Hameroff argued that these subneuronal cytoskeleton components could be the basic units of processing rather than the neurons themselves. The book was primarily concerned with information processing, with consciousness secondary at this stage.
Separately from Hameroff, Roger Penrose had published his first book on consciousness, The Emperor's New Mind. On the basis of Gödel's incompleteness theorems, he argued that the brain could perform functions that no computer or system of algorithms could. From this it could follow that consciousness itself might be fundamentally non-algorithmic, and incapable of being modeled as a classical Turing machine type of computer. By contrast, the idea that it could be explained mechanistically was prevalent in the field of Artificial Intelligence at that time.
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