From the "Philosophical Parables" Column

Once, Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov completed a neuro-training session under the "Moscow Longevity" program. There, they placed a neuro-helmet on his head and asked him to open and close his eyes at his own free will. All the while, the neuro-helmet would say, "Your eyes are closed," or "Your eyes are open"—in a very tender voice. And it was always right.

After the neuro-training, Ivan Ivanovich clearly remembered the way home, mentally calculated the logarithm of twenty-five to the base five, and did not forget to buy a bottle of kefir along the way.

Then he suddenly noticed that his eyes were glowing with laser beams as a result of the neuro-training. This turned out to be quite convenient in certain situations—for instance, he could chase the cat around the floor with them.

Consciousness works in much the same way. From the perspective of quantum-neurobiological synthesis, it can be characterized as a hologram projection that comes to life under the influence of a laser beam of attention.

According to the Pribram–Bohm holographic model, the brain records experience not in localized neurons, but in the form of distributed interference patterns of phase waves, which perfectly illustrates the fundamental data integration from Giulio Tononi's Integrated Information Theory. The role of the laser beam reading the three-dimensional matrix of meanings is played by the focused spotlight mechanism from Bernard Baars's Global Workspace Theory.

And according to the Orch-OR model by Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff, the physical foundation of this light beam is quantum coherence within the cytoskeleton's microtubules in neurons.

As a result, the laser continuously decodes the spatial hologram—a generative model of reality from Karl Friston's predictive brain theory—turning a chaotic stream of probabilities into a unified flow of subjective experience.

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