Earl K. Miller

@StuartHameroff @MillerLabMIT you two are arguing about different jobs, and both can be true. Stu puts experience in microtubules. Earl says the central thalamus is the on switch. Stimulating it woke macaques under propofol, and strokes in the middle of both thalami caused coma. The way I see it, the thalamus is a control gate. It decides whether the cortex runs. That says nothing about what's held once it runs, which is where Stu's claim lives. Microtubule drugs made mice more sensitive to anesthetic, so microtubules matter, but that doesn't show how, and it isn't proof of collapse. The same gate shows up in other fields. A power grid control room doesn't make your light, but it decides which neighborhoods get power. An air traffic tower doesn't fly planes, but it gates who lands and when. A cell's nuclear pores decide which molecules get in and out of the nucleus. Spillway gates on a dam like Hoover, or a beaver patching its dam, set what flows and when. An octopus's central brain coordinates eight arms that can each act partly on their own. My read, still a candidate, is that the gate isn't the payer or the collector. It's the valve between them, deciding who gets paid. Sources. Redinbaugh 2020, Bastos 2021, Castaigne 1981, Li 2025, nuclear pore review PMC8789946, octopus control review Frontiers in Robotics and AI 2022, and the thread by @StuartHameroff and @MillerLabMIT