Qualifies· moderateORCH-E008
Hagan, Hameroff & Tuszyński: revised estimate 10⁻⁵–10⁻⁴ s — still short of requirement
- what the source states
- The abstract states that the authors "critically examine the assumptions made in [Tegmark's] model and re-examine the decoherence times for superposed states of microtubule tubulins," and that "correction of Tegmark's assumptions yields decoherence times of 10⁻⁵ to 10⁻⁴ seconds" — up to seven to eight orders of magnitude longer than Tegmark's figures. The paper enumerates several specific objections, the most consequential being that Tegmark modeled a soliton in superposition along the microtubule rather than the superposed protein conformations of the Orch OR proposal.
- what we infer
- The central objection lands: the two papers computed decoherence for different physical states, so the seven-to-eight-order-of-magnitude gap between them is partly an artifact of modeling different things. That is a genuine correction and it is why "the brain is warm and wet, therefore no" is an inadequate argument. But this record is filed as `qualifies` rather than `supports` because even the proponents' own revised number does not reach their requirement: 10⁻⁵–10⁻⁴ s is one to two orders of magnitude short of the ~25 ms conscious moment the theory needs. Two calculations disagreeing by orders of magnitude, neither anchored to a measurement, is the actual state of this rung — and it is why ORCH-C010 is assessed as unresolved rather than refuted.
- limitations
- Also a calculation, not a measurement.
- Authored by two of the theory's principals; not an independent reanalysis.
- Even the favorable estimate falls one to two orders of magnitude short of the theory's own requirement.
- The competing estimates have never been adjudicated by experiment, which is the only thing that would settle them.