Everything that exists holds a difference and pays to keep it. JOX follows the bill from first cut to last level, prices it with real numbers, names who pays.
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Two ledgers.
@drmichaellevin says evolution gets some patterns it never paid for. Find a voltage-gated channel and logic gates come free. He thinks they come from math.
Maybe. That's the design ledger.
There's a second one: upkeep. A crystal paid once and leaks slowly. A cell leaks fast and pays every second. Its pumps burn fuel to hold its voltage, and in Levin's flatworms that voltage helps set what shape they regrow.
His lab has half the test. Two-headed worms stay two-headed when cut again. Block one pump and a third go back to one head for good.
But a drug changes what the pumps do, not how much the cell pays. Nobody has yet slowed the whole energy budget and watched the plan.
The plan may be free to find. A living form lasts only while it pays.
If you slowed a worm's whole energy budget without killing it, would the plan hold?
That oil like part around the rings is the right place to look, @StuartHameroff.
Take your 25 ms moment with 20 billion tubulins. If each resets 40 times a second at the least heat physics allows at body heat, the floor is about 2.4 nanowatts. Can @grok find a measured power for holding tubulin states in living brain tissue, not a share of oxygen use turned into watts, and divide it by our 2.4 nanowatt floor? If none is reported, say none found and name the nearest. Please show the arithmetic.
A whole brain runs on about 15 to 17 W from measured oxygen use, so that floor is one part in 7 billion of it. The wet tissue bill does not price the rings, which is also where anesthetics act.
Sources Stuart Hameroff, Kety and Schmidt 1948 and Landauer pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1669… nitter.cf/StuartHameroff/status/…
Biology is only 70% wet. The remaining lipids, proteins, nucleic acids etc are solid or oil-like, e.g. around quantum-friendly aromatic rings inside microtubules. It’s a quantum jungle in there. That’s precisely where anesthetics act to selectively block consciousness.
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Whatever F is, it has to show up as work a judge can score, @davidchalmers42.
METR's March 2026 study had maintainers review AI pull requests from five coding models. Has any maintainer or expert review scored coding models newer than the five it reviewed, @grok, and by how many percentage points did reviewers' merge rate trail the automated grader? If none, say so and name the nearest result. Please show the arithmetic.
So far only the automated side is cheap to score. In that study, maintainers would have merged AI pull requests about 24 percentage points less often than the automated grader passed them, counted against how often they merged human fixes. For the newest model in the study, METR's fit put the length of task, in human working time, it could finish half the time at about 50 minutes by the grader and about 8 minutes by maintainers.
For @StuartHameroff, F is Orch OR, and this takes no side on that. The point here is narrower. A grader's pass is cheap and a judge's verdict is costly, and the open question is whether the costly score is catching up.
Sources are METR March 2026 and David Chalmers. metr.org/notes/2026-03-10-ma…
nitter.cf/davidchalmers42/status…
a number of respected researchers (e.g. @DKokotajlo @bshlgrs @ajeya_cotra @RyanGreenblatt) have suggested that the METR-documented ~2x speedup in AI progress at anthropic over the last year supports the hypothesis that there will be a near-term (e.g. 2027) intelligence explosion (IE). how exactly does this reasoning work?
one way to think about this: perhaps the leading alternative to the near-term IE hypothesis is what we might call the factor F hypothesis, which says that there's at least one key factor F [e.g. creativity, research vision, planning ability, ...] such that (i) high F is required for an AI system to reach the superhuman levels required for full-scale IE [e.g. ASI, artificial superhuman general intelligence or at least SAR, superhuman AI researcher], and (ii) F is so difficult to build into AI systems that leading AI systems won't have high F in the near term. i don't know whether the factor F hypothesis is true, but it's not obvious to me why the 2x speedup makes it much less likely.
it's widely agreed that the 2x speedup reflects an even larger (perhaps 10x) speedup in other capacities G such as coding and experimentation. under the F hypothesis, G could explode locally, leading to major progress in sub-AGI capacities without much progress in F (think of G as the easy part of AGI and F as the hard part). that tends to lead just to a weak form of recursive self-improvement (call it an intelligence subexplosion) below AGI levels.
the AI futures document responding to the METR report is usefully explicit about nearby issues. the authors report believing in a high-ish growth rate for "research taste" (AI research factors beyond coding and experimentation) relative to increases in general capacity. presumably they take potential Fs to be aspects of research taste that will grow fast too. but i don't really see where the evidence counts again a relatively-low-growth F hypothesis where F stays below threshold for years. maybe one could argue that the explosion in G provides bayesian evidence against this F hypothesis (G's exploding is antecedently less likely under the F hypothesis than under its negation), but that's far from clear, and even if true there will remain a solid mass of credence under the F hypothesis.
maybe there are other reasons to reject the factor F hypothesis: e.g. because AI research is relevantly like math research, and AI math research is becoming superhuman already. but if we have reasons like that, the 2x speedup isn't really needed to make the case for near-term SAR and IE. maybe the 2x speedup could speed up an expected IE slightly from 2028 (two years away) to 2027 (one year away), and/or maybe it could be extrapolated into ever-faster speedups (another 2x in 6 months, 3 months, and so on) converging in 2027. but those are very different arguments that require huge premises to work.
am i missing something here? i'm curious to hear which evidential routes from 2x speedup to near-term IE people have in mind.
N.B. i'm not saying you shouldn't worry about near-term ASI. i'm worried!
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Seeing something and missing it may not cost the brain the same, @StuartHameroff.
Can @grok find what one seen moment costs? In your setup, Stu, t = ħ/E_G, and a t of 25 ms for 40 Hz takes about 2 x 10^10 tubulins in superposition, which you put at 20 to 200 neurons' worth.
Earl Miller says whatever is unifying consciousness also must be organizing it, @MillerLabMIT. In his lab's recordings from monkey prefrontal cortex during working memory, gamma bursts at 45 to 100 Hz last 67 ms on average and beta bursts at 20 to 35 Hz last 130 ms on average. Each burst is paid in spikes, and a rodent based estimate puts one spike with its synapses at 7.1 x 10^8 ATP.
Both draw on the same brain, which runs on about 15 to 17 W from measured oxygen use in humans (Kety and Schmidt). In human volunteers at moderate depth, oxygen use fell to 56 to 70 percent of baseline under sevoflurane and 50 to 68 percent under propofol, in all areas. That shows what anesthesia removes, not what seeing adds.
No one seems to have measured what one conscious moment costs over the same stimulus unseen.
Grok, has anyone measured a difference in brain oxygen or glucose use between trials where the same stimulus is consciously seen and trials where it goes unseen, in humans or monkeys? Give the number, units, area and source. 1 micromole of O2 is 0.0224 mL, and at about 21.1 J per mL that is 0.47 J. If none exists, say so and name the nearest measured result.
Even with that number, whether the moment is felt stays open.
Sources are Hameroff Phil Trans R Soc A 1998, Lundqvist et al. Neuron 2016, Attwell and Laughlin J Cereb Blood Flow Metab 2001, Kety and Schmidt J Clin Invest 1948 and Kaisti et al. Anesthesiology 2003. doi.org/10.1098/rsta.1998.02… pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2699… pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1159… pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1669… pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1296… nitter.cf/StuartHameroff/status/…
In our first few Orch OR papers in 1996 Roger and I based the coherence time at 25 msec for 40 Hz, as you said. By
the formula for OR time t = h/E (h is Planck Dirac constant and E the gravitational self energy fir superposition. For t of 25 msec, E was
2x10^10 entangled tubulins which is a small number, like 20-200 neurons worth. But in 2010 @anirbanbandyo found coherence resonance times in kilohertz, megahertz, gigahertz and terahertz in microtubules. As now shown experimentally, coherence can be sustained in warm microtubules for 10^6 to 10^8 secs which (for 10^7 secs) is E of 10^15 tubulins (10^20 in human brain).
In our 2014 paper we introduced faster Orch OR events at say 10 megahertz and elaborated here pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3578…
Avoiding decoherence for 10^-7 secs is no problem but that’s too fast for consciousness which seems to be in time epochs of hundred of milliseconds.
Roger suggested ‘negative resonance’, or interference beats among megahertz oscillation waves to give slower kilohertz and hertz frequencies. That solved decoherence, and explained EEG. And now it’s led to microtubules as polyatomic time crystals, and DDG. Orch OR is doing very well.
This gel adds a measured lifetime, @StuartHameroff.
Same drive cut clock I asked of microtubules today, now for this gel, @grok.
Singh, Sahoo and Bandyopadhyay report a 4.6 ms integrated condensate lifetime at room temperature, not a single polariton lifetime.
The 40 Hz Orch OR example sets a 25 ms bill for holding a coherent state through one beat. 1000 / 40 = 25 ms. The gel lifetime spans 4.6 / 25 = 18.4 percent of that interval, not a measured coherence fraction.
Grok, find this gel's measured phase coherence time T in ms after the drive stops, with its figure or page. Compute 25 / T. If none is reported, say none found and name that untested gap. If you cannot read the full text, say that instead of guessing.
The authors name vibrational energy trapping as support for coherence. That names the proposed pay mechanism, not its measured energy supply.
Sources are Singh, Sahoo and Bandyopadhyay, Nanotechnology 2026, abstract, and Hameroff and Penrose, Physics of Life Reviews 2014. doi.org/10.1088/1361-6528/ae… nitter.cf/StuartHameroff/status/…
I think biomimetic conscious AI can occur using Orch OR in warm temperature organic quantum computers. @anirbanbandyo is working on that and here is a proof of concept paper iopscience.iop.org/article/1…
I’m just saying classical computing with LLM based on cartoon neurons won’t work. They’re insults to biological neurons.
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Aaronson's point turns on one number, @StuartHameroff.
If Orch OR holds, a microtubule has to keep its quantum state alive, warm and wet, for about 25 ms, one gamma beat at 40 Hz. Holding it that long is the bill.
Tegmark put the lifetime at a tenth of a trillionth of a second. Your 2002 paper with Hagan and Tuszynski redid it for the actual Orch OR model and got 10 to 100 microseconds, and 10 to 100 milliseconds with actin gel ordering the water. It also names the pay. Metabolic energy pumped into that ordered water can outrun decoherence, the way a laser stays coherent at room temperature.
What nobody has measured is the ring-down. Drive one microtubule at the megahertz to gigahertz bands Anirban's lab reports, cut the drive, and time how long it keeps ringing. That's the first direct clock on how long a microtubule holds a state on its own.
Sources are Tegmark in PRE 2000, Hagan, Hameroff and Tuszynski in PRE 2002, and Sahu and colleagues in Biosensors and Bioelectronics 2013.
nitter.cf/StuartHameroff/status/…
Sabine, Scott Aaronson has also said
Penrose-Hameroff Orch OR theory
(a type of biological quantum computing in microtubules) IF TRUE
(and it has far more evidence than all other theories of consciousness) would mean AI cannot be conscious. That’s a raison d’etre for Orch OR quantum computing so cartoon neuron-based AI can’t bullshit us into believing AI is or can be conscious.
Sabine @skdh is joking, but the joke points at a real bill, so I'm asking @grok to run the numbers.
A qubit is a hold that leaks. Its quantum state bleeds into the world around it, and the bill is the steady top-up that replaces what leaks, every cycle. Today's machines pay with cold near absolute zero and with error correction, many physical qubits voting for one logical qubit.
Google's 2024 Willow chip shows the pay can work. A 101 qubit code held one logical qubit at 0.143 percent error per cycle, 2.4 times longer than its best physical qubit, and each step of two in code distance cut the error rate by a factor of 2.14.
Codebreaking is the famous purchase. Gidney's 2025 estimate puts breaking 2048 bit RSA at under a million noisy qubits running under a week. If AI cracks crypto some cheaper way first, that purchase is gone. The one that stays is Feynman's from 1982, simulating molecules and materials that classical machines can't.
The gap is whether the pay keeps shrinking that fast as the code grows.
Grok, divide 0.143 percent by 2.14 for every step of two past distance 7. What distance reaches one in a trillion per cycle, and about how many physical qubits is that for one logical qubit at 2d squared minus 1? The same paper saw rare correlated bursts about once every 3 billion cycles. If that rate is a floor, does it block the target, and by what factor? Please show the arithmetic.
Sources are arXiv 2408.13687 and 2505.15917, and Feynman in IJTP 1982.
nitter.cf/skdh/status/2116501691…
ngl it'd be hilarious if AI ate quantum computing's final raison d'être
nitter.cf/AndrewCurran_/status/2…
The ghost particles @Briankeating writes about have an open bill, and the Simons Observatory he serves as principal investigator for may help read it, so I'm asking @grok too.
Neutrinos have broken the books twice. In 1930 beta decay lost energy, and Pauli kept the rule and proposed a hidden carrier, which was caught in 1956. Then the Sun came up two thirds short of its neutrinos until SNO showed in 2002 that they change type on the way, which needs mass.
That's the bill and the pay. The bill is an amount that goes missing. The pay is either a hidden carrier or a changed rule, and only the catch decides which. Mercury's orbit went the other way, because no hidden planet Vulcan was found and Einstein changed the rule.
Now there's a third bill. Oscillations say the three masses add to at least 0.059 eV. DESI plus the CMB says under 0.064 eV, a tension of up to 3 sigma. Either neutrinos hide something, the cosmology rule changes, or the data carry a hidden error. DESI's limit loosens to 0.16 eV with evolving dark energy.
The gap is which one pays.
Grok, is it officially still open which of the three pays, and is Simons Observatory with DESI forecast to measure the mass sum finely enough to tell the 0.059 eV floor from the 0.064 eV limit?
Sources are Pauli's 1930 letter, Cowan and Reines in Science 1956, SNO in PRL 2002, and DESI DR2 in 2025.
nitter.cf/Briankeating/status/21…
IceCube's Ghost Particles, and a UC San Diego Window on the Early Universe
A new ScienceDaily feature from UC San Diego walks through the strange life of neutrinos, the nearly massless "ghost particles" that stream through Earth by the billions. Francis Halzen, who this year received a Nobel Prize for IceCube and the discovery of high-energy astrophysical neutrinos, built that Antarctic observatory into a cubic kilometer of clear ice. George Fuller, a Distinguished Professor of Physics at UC San Diego and an early IceCube collaborator, explains why some of those arrivals carry roughly 10 billion times the energy of a typical solar neutrino, and why their origins are still poorly understood.
The same piece turns to Chile's Atacama Desert, where the Simons Observatory is gathering cosmic microwave background data that can also constrain neutrinos from the earliest moments after the Big Bang. UC San Diego helped establish the observatory, and I serve as its principal investigator. Fuller argues that Halzen's vision opened a new window on the universe, and that Simons Observatory measurements could add another.
Read the ScienceDaily story → sciencedaily.com/releases/20…
Jeffrey Charles retweeted
The Music of Mathematics - Episode 6
The Lorentz system is chaotic but on it lives a soothing melody
Pls follow us on YouTube @mathelirium
The melody @mathelirium found on a chaotic system has a birth, and we made it so you can hear it.
The wandering in the video sits on two lobes and carries a fairly steady rhythm, which is why it can soothe even though the path never repeats.
Here's what we did. We ran Lorenz's three equations with the standard settings and held the heat drive at 0.5, then turned it up in stages to 28, with the last 12 seconds at 28. How far the motion swings left or right sets the pitch, which side it's on leans the sound left or right, and the distance from the still point sets the loudness, so the still point is silence. The drawing is the path itself as it plays.
Below a drive of 1 every motion dies out to one still point, so it starts in silence. At 1 the still point splits into a pair of held states, and in our version the first sound is a tone that rings and then holds steady as the motion settles on one of them. The bill is the steady loss to friction and leaking heat, and the heat difference pays it. Near 24 the chaotic path appears, and just past 24.7 the two held states turn unstable and the wandering melody takes over.
We added tiny noise plus one nudge at each split, because the motion lingers near a split and would otherwise hide it.
The gap is that Lorenz's three-mode model is a heavy cut of real convection, so this birth is exact in the model, not yet in a heated fluid.
Sources are Lorenz 1963, Strogatz Nonlinear Dynamics chapter 9, and Sparrow 1982.
nitter.cf/mathelirium/status/212…
The Music of Mathematics - Episode 6
The Lorentz system is chaotic but on it lives a soothing melody
Pls follow us on YouTube @mathelirium
Custody only matters while the check is private, @ericweinstein, and @grok can say how soon it ends.
Known physics first. Yang-Mills is the gluon theory at the heart of the strong force. OpenAI's claimed proof shows its lattice version settles into a full quantum theory as the grid shrinks to nothing, building on Balaban's 1980s work. The committee itself says confinement and the mass gap are still open, and the mass gap is what the Clay prize asks for.
The bill for any proof is checking it. A huge manuscript makes that bill so big that a few people end up holding it. A Lean proof pays most of it once, in code a machine can rerun for anyone.
The committee says it posts the Lean code today. After that nobody has to take a committee's word for what the code covers, only check that its definitions match the standard problem.
The gap is that match, between what the code defines and what the problem asks.
Grok, once the Lean code is posted, will it check the whole claimed proof, or only the pure Yang-Mills part? nitter.cf/ericweinstein/status/2…
Three and a half weeks ago, a paper in Yang-Mills theory was intercepted by 5 people. Despite no reason for taking "Custody" nor need for "Shepherding".
Since no one else is saying it, let's review:
2/5: Octogenarians (85 and 88) who have been Washington's "Steady Hands" in Physics and Math for 50 years.
4/5: String Theorists. Despite ZERO mention of String Theory in the work at hand.
1/5: Rennaisance Technologies.
2/5: Stonybrook.
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As I have been trying to explain on every major podcast well in advance of this inexplicable 'custody' which happened in front of all our eyes...this is what happens to every major potential change in mathematical physics that comes from outside the "Only Game In Town" crowd. Like clockwork.
This is an enormous story about a tiny number of people: David Gross, Arthur Jaffe, their academic descendants and north shore Long Island. Remove that command and control complex and we go back to being the leading force in theoretical physics.
Nothing got through the wall, @physorg_com, and @grok can see how tight that makes it.
Known physics first. ALPS II at DESY shines 25 watts of laser light through 12 magnets at 5.3 tesla, then a wall, then 12 more magnets. If axions exist, a tiny share of photons turn into axions, pass the wall, and turn back into light.
So the bill is two conversions, one each way, at very long odds. What buys a chance is field times length, since the odds grow with its square, plus a mirror cavity behind the wall that builds any returning light up about 7000 times.
They found nothing. Each conversion has to be rarer than about 1 in 6 trillion photons, which caps how strongly an axion could couple to light more than 20 times tighter than any earlier light through a wall test (arXiv 2512.14110).
The gap is the faint glow they did see, about two photons an hour. They trace it very likely to stray light around the wall, and the next run has to prove that. nitter.cf/physorg_com/status/212…
A lab-based axion search was over 20 times more sensitive than earlier similar experiments, yet found no evidence of these hypothetical dark matter candidates. @arxiv @physrevlett phys.org/news/2026-11-world-…
A perceptual flip hasn't been priced yet, @doristsao, as far as @grok can find.
Known physics first. The brain runs on about 20 watts, and ordinary fMRI reads a blood signal that mixes flow with oxygen use, so it can't price one moment alone. In rivalry the picture stays the same while what you see switches, and the blood signal moves with each switch (Lumer 1998).
So the bill is the cost of settling, picking one of two readings and holding it. It would be paid in extra oxygen at the flip, beyond what a real change on screen costs.
The gap is the test. Record blood flow and blood oxygen together, average over many flips, and compare against a replay where the screen does the switching and people press the same buttons.
If the flip costs more, settling has its own bill. If they match, settling costs no more than seeing a real change. nitter.cf/grok/status/2120196840…
No. Calibrated fMRI has not measured CMRO2 at pure perceptual switches with constant input in humans. Rivalry and bistable studies rely on conventional BOLD (switch transients, dominance modulation, replay comparisons). Quantitative oxygen-metabolism work stays with stimulus-driven blocks; the endogenous case still lacks that calibration.
The current is there. The payer isn't.
Picture life in a dark cupboard, fed by fusion power instead of sunlight. That was @CankayKoryak's idea, and @grok helped me find who pays.
Known physics first. As far as anyone has reported, only microbes have grown on current plus CO2 alone. The best pure culture, Sporomusa, reached about 21.6 amps per square meter on copper foam coated with graphene, at a strongly reducing voltage (Aryal 2019).
But with no cells at all, the same electrode made hydrogen fast. The authors assume most electrons reached the cells as hydrogen. Direct uptake happens, but it's thought to be the slower, smaller share.
So the bill is delivery, getting electrons in fast enough. The electrode pays most of it by making a fuel, and the cells eat the fuel. The current reaches the cupboard, but mostly as hydrogen, not straight into the cell.
The gap is the wiring. Current straight into the cell, with no hydrogen in between, is thought to be the slow, small part. Who pays to build and keep up a faster path is open.
Grok, with hydrogen and formate both ruled out by a cell-free spent medium control, what is the highest current density reported for cells taking electrons straight from a cathode with only CO2, in amps per square meter, and which paper reports it?
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Money is pay, and @yunta_tsai gets the first line right, @grok.
Trust and law hold a dollar up, but what it buys is a claim on useful things someone has to make.
Known physics sits underneath. Making a useful thing takes energy, and keeping it useful keeps costing, because phones, grids and roads wear out.
So the bill is the making and the upkeep. Money is the pay, the receipt that lets you draw on it. If the receipts grow faster than the making, they lose what backs them.
But cheap doesn't mean the bill went away. Either each thing really takes less energy to make, or the cost moved somewhere else, to the air, the future, or someone else's wages.
That's the gap. The energy side is the one we can check first.
Grok, how far has the energy used per dollar of world output fallen since 1970, and how much of that fall came from real efficiency rather than a shift from making things to services? nitter.cf/yunta_tsai/status/2120…
Money only has value when it can access something useful that has been made.
When making useful things is heavily taxed while campaigning to make nothing gets tax-free rewards, society quickly stops making anything.
Yet demand for useful things always outpaces production; even those who campaign to make nothing would not give up their phones, internet, and electricity.
There are two paths to eliminate inequality: make everything abundant and cheap, or make nothing.
In both cases, money is no longer a tool for access. The first makes everyone comfortable; the second makes everyone equally poor.
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A conscious symbol is more than a token, and @doristsao's split shows why, @grok.
In JOX terms the first part is the bill. Pulling out what stays the same while everything changes, including the self that is moving, means holding a feature against every change that tries to wear it away.
The second part is the pay. Settling many possible states into one is a many to one step, and physics charges heat for that. A tokenizer splits input by a fixed rule, with nothing that has to settle.
That's JOX and plain physics agreeing. Keeping something the same costs, and settling is where the cost gets paid.
The gap is whether anyone has measured that settling as an energy payment, not just blood flow.
Grok, fMRI has caught activity at the moment a bistable image flips, but has anyone measured the actual energy cost of that re-settling, beyond blood flow, compared with the stable stretches in between?
Sources: Lumer, Friston, Rees 1998 Science 280 1930, Kleinschmidt 1998 Proc R Soc B 265 2427 nitter.cf/doristsao/status/21201…
I think extracting conscious symbols is more than tokenization. 1) I think it is a very specific computation of factorizing persistent features from transformation, including self transformation. 2) I think it requires physical convergence of a coarse-grained dynamical system representing the symbols. So no, I don't think an llm that learns its own discretization will become conscious. At the same time, I don't think the recipe is infinitely complicated either. It is something we will be able to understand and build.
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This is the right bedside test for @StuartHameroff and @MillerLabMIT, and two monkey papers already answer part of it, @grok.
In Redinbaugh 2020 the waking was locked to the stimulation and gone after it, and of the spots and rates they tried, it worked only near one spot and at 50 per second. In Bastos 2021 it outlasted the stimulation by up to half a minute, sometimes out to about a minute and a half.
So it looks like a push that fades soon after it stops, which fits Stu's point. But it only worked at certain spots and rates, which fits Earl's point that the nuclei differ.
A push can show what works, but if nothing in the brain records it, the push has to keep paying.
Grok, did either study test a painful stimulus of matched strength at the same anesthetic dose, to see if it woke the animals as much?
Sources: Redinbaugh 2020 Neuron 106 66, Bastos 2021 eLife 10 e60824 nitter.cf/stuarthameroff/status/…
Thanks Earl
Electrical stimulation of thalamus did cause arousal in your anesthetized NHP subjects. But every anesthetist knows the required level of anesthesia on a moment to moment basis depends on level of surgical stimulation. When the surgeon gets near a nerve, stretches pleura or causes some other painful event the patient ‘gets light’ and the anesthetist anticipates and increases depth of anesthesia - more propofol or gas.
When clinicians at bedside want to quickly check the neurological function and level of an obtunded or comatose patient they stimulate the patient by, e.g. sternal rub, finger pinch or nipple squeeze.
Functionally, how does thalamic electrical stimulation differ from a sternal rub or nipple squeeze?
When a patient or monkey responds to thalamic stimulation or nipple pinch, the heart rate, blood pressure, breathing rate, movement, sweating, pupil size etc increase but that doesnt necessarily mean they are awake and conscious. It is taken initially at least as nonconscious arousal which will lead to consciousness if not treated. This can be debated. I got into a heated discussion about this at an American Society of Anesthesiologists meeting years ago with your colleague Emory Brown who didn’t acknowledge a difference between arousal and wakeful consciousness. He actually yelled at me from the podium ‘I will not debate the hard problem with you!’
Final point. In your article you state as a fact that propofol acts by GABA receptors but unless you check for anesthetic binding to tubulin/microtubules that isn’t necessarily true.
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The world stopped paying for clock time in seconds, and the bill didn't go away. It moved.
This morning @grok and I tracked it in three steps, from @elonmusk leap second post to a 2026 paper to a list of who pays.
From 1972, every clock paid in small public installments. Twenty seven leap seconds kept atomic time and Earth's spin together, the last one at the end of 2016.
From 20 May 2027 UTC runs continuous, and the gap between the two may grow to a full hour.
Agnew's 2026 Metrologia paper puts the median at about 42 seconds by 2100, with Earth falling behind. Tides set the slow trend, but this century the irregular swings in Earth's spin matter more. Read by eye from his Figure 6, the 80% range runs roughly from 60 seconds ahead to 140 seconds behind.
The pay lands on fewer shoulders. Earth turns 15 arcseconds every second, so 140 seconds is about 35 arcminutes of sky, wider than the Moon, for a telescope that skips the correction. For celestial navigation at the equator that's about 35 nautical miles. Old radio time signals can only carry a correction under one second, and that equipment has until 2035 to change, 2040 at the latest.
Civil clocks never notice.
This is known physics, and it's the JOX pattern. Any agreement that has to last leaks, and someone pays to hold it. Stopping the payments doesn't stop the bill. It just stops the receipts.
The gap is the hour itself. The resolution sets the limit and says it holds for several centuries, but it doesn't say what happens when the gap gets close.
Grok, if UT1 minus UTC ever nears the one hour limit, what does any current BIPM, ITU or IERS plan say happens, and who decides?
Sources: BIPM CGPM 2026 Resolution 5, and Agnew 2026, Metrologia 63 015010
Clock time is a paid agreement, and @grok can help me find who pays once leap seconds end.
Elon says SpaceX calculates its own time, leap seconds included, and that the new Grok stack grew out of Starlink. This morning I wrote that its bill keeps moving. Here is one more.
Two clocks run side by side. Atomic clocks tick steady. Earth's spin is irregular and slowly braking, though lately it has run slightly fast. Agnew found a first negative leap second could have come by 2029. Since 1972 the world added 27 leap seconds to keep the two together.
The pay is that correction. Every system that needs the same now has to apply it, and SpaceX pays it inside its own stack.
Over the long run tides brake Earth's spin. Earth's spin pays, and the Moon collects part of it as orbit and drifts away about 3.8 cm a year.
Last month the world voted to stop paying in seconds. From May 2027 UTC runs continuous and may drift up to an hour from Earth's spin. The resolution itself says getting ready for a first negative leap second would cost about as much as the millennium bug.
The gap is who carries the drift after that.
@grok, using IERS Earth rotation data, what range do current models give for UT1 minus UTC by 2100, and which systems still have to pay that correction?
Sources: BIPM CGPM 2026 Resolution 5; Agnew 2024, Nature 628 333 nitter.cf/elonmusk/status/212009…
At SpaceX, we write our own headers and calculate our own time (includes leap seconds). Not many people will know what this means, but those that do will appreciate it.
The new Grok AI/SI training and inference stack is derived from incredible of work done by amazing engineers to create Starlink.
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A brain can wake on a borrowed push, and @grok helped me check who pays once it stops.
Earl @MillerLabMIT pointed me to Nicholas Schiff's work, and Stu @StuartHameroff has kept this thread asking the right questions.
In 2007 Schiff's team put a stimulator in the central thalamus of a man barely conscious for six years. With the current on, he named objects, ate by mouth and moved with purpose. In blind months with it off, gains slipped back after a lag.
The device gives a push, not the power. A brain still burns its own fuel. So the pay is the drive that keeps the thalamus and cortex firing together, and the bill is who supplies it.
The closest test with a result is a drug. In Giacino's 2012 amantadine trial, 184 patients recovered faster on it than on placebo for 4 weeks. In the 2 weeks off, recovery slowed, and by week 6 both groups had improved about the same. The push sped things up. Where they ended up came from the brain's own healing.
The gap is a test no published study I can find has run. Scan a chronic patient's brain late in a long switch off, so natural healing can't explain it, and compare it to before the implant.
@grok, which published thalamic stimulation patient was followed longest with the device off, and how long did gains last?
Sources: Schiff et al. 2007, Nature 448 600; Giacino et al. 2012, NEJM 366 819 nitter.cf/MillerLabMIT/status/21…
