The Quantum Mind Black Book
The quantum mind is a bottom up complex system powered by a quantum force field. It is alive and it is invisible. My goal here is to sneak up on it and show it to you.
Bottom up design.
The classical creation system is top-down. It was instantiated by the Israelites three millennia ago.They created words and metaphors and cobbled together a description of the human universe as starting with God. Mankind found itself at the top of the world food chain. Top-down design made sense for us and it still does. Sun gods riding golden chariots across the sky, other lesser Gods living on mountaintops.
Nicholaus Copernicus in 1543 posthumously published his book, “De Revolutionibus Orbium et Celestium”. He basically criticized top-down design which at the time was a quite dangerous deed which is why he said “don’t let anyone read this until I am in heaven”. (possibly overheard at a book shop nestled near the Frombork Cathedral in Poland).
Galileo Galilei was inspired by Copernicus and helped design the telescope. He proved Nicholaus right and ended up under house arrest. Fortunately, he knew people who knew people which saved him from being conflagrated like a Napa Valley vineyard.
The resolution revolution.
When Anton Leeuwenhoek improved the microscope in the seventeenth century, he was shocked to discover that the earth was carpeted with microbes. A hundred years later, Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch tied together microbes and infectious diseases. And that was only a century and a half ago and was an early vision into the concept of bottom-up design.
The persistent scientist Charles Darwin catalogued the tree of life and also ignited the creationism debate. Gregor Mendel, a Darwin contemporary mapped the genetics of plants and discovered the binary arithmetic of which Darwin had postulated. In fact, a copy of Darwin’s book, “On the Origin of Species”, was found in Mendel’s library.
The good news is you can believe in God and bottom-up design simultaneously. They are not mutually exclusive.
Can you have a design without a designer? Can you write a book without a brain? More on that later. We can stare up into the sky at a sunset and resonate with it without ever studying physics or climatology. I suggest that the emergence of life is driven by quantum forces and want to make the case for this.
Quantum force field
For you non-cosmologists, quantum forces are the jiggling protons and electrons, a self-stirring quantum soup. If you fall for that metaphor you will be close to understanding a bottom up system with its very own power supply.
Complex System
Bertram Russell and Alfred North Whitehead wrote an encyclopedia of mathematics. Therein, they proclaimed that all problems could be solved using natural numbers and then challenged anyone to prove them wrong. Kurt Godel did that by creating complex system theory. [1] He used the concept of recursion in his proof. Basically recursion means, “what goes around comes around”. In software design one is able to write recursive algorithms. The idea here is the quantum mind employs recursive algorithms with a vengeance. More on this later
Epigenetics
Gregor Mendel, with his peapods, discovered a binary genetic code. The belief still persists to this day among medical professionals that it is largely a non-modifiable linear deterministic condition. A major discovery of the last decade is that Vitamin D is an epigenetic promoter. Interestingly, few practicing physicians are aware of epigenetics. The cell is covered with signaling platforms floating upon lipid rafts that reach inside through the kinase pathways to the genome.
An intriguing example of epigenetics is the genodromous (to move from one species to another) migration of Borrelia Burgdorferi. She sleeps quietly in the belly of a deer tick until a gush of mammalian blood floods in. Epigenetic triggers like Iron, Iodine and Sulfur ignite her energy pathways and she magically changes her clothing. By swapping out her outer surface proteins (OSPA,B) she cloaks herself for the journey into the rich but dangerous mammalian milieu of natural killer cells and antimicrobial peptides. Not only does embryonic ontogeny recapitulate phylogeny, it persists throughout life.
It was discovered that our genetic code has over a thousand Vitamin D receptors. The vitamin D attaches to genes and switches them on and off. In other words, we can plink on the keys of our genetic code and modify the songs to which we must dance. The traditional view of the genetic code is that it is like a roll of music in a player piano. If you get a melodic Scott Joplin tune, you dance easily through life and live long. If you get a dissonant piece of music, your fate is to die young. There are numerous other gene modifiers that are being discovered that prolong life and prevent disease. Many are inhabitants of our food environment.
Twenty years ago when the genetic code was mapped, the claim was that miraculous breakthroughs would soon follow but unfortunately, the gene map is mostly a generic script. Nobody has found the “Sound of Music” in there yet. To put it another way, analyzing the paint pigments will never yield up a sense of Mona Lisa’s smile. It does not exist at the pigment level. Complex systems are hierarchical and scalable. In hierarchical systems, information loss occurs in the transition phase.
The only way to decode the genome is to give it to the quantum computer inside any human egg and watch it miraculously unfold. Unfortunately, we do not have the tools to observe deeply hierarchical life systems. There is more parallel processing power in a fertilized chicken egg than in all the computers on the planet.
After the War, Albert Einstein strolled around the Princeton campus with his friend Kurt Gödel. After Einstein’s cosmic relativity and Heisenberg’s quantum uncertainty, Gödel filled in the vast space between quarks and galaxies with the Undecidability theorem. He laid the foundation for complex system theory.
His discovery was based upon the obscure concept of the recursive algorithm (RA). RA’s are the natural number equivalent of Alice’s rabbit hole. They are bottomless. An RA is a feedback loop.
The most elegant evocation of Gödel’s work is the idea that, ‘truth is a more powerful concept than proof’. Is it not intriguing that the most complex system in the universe is a living cell and that it did not even come into being until billions of years after the Big Bang fireworks? The divine ballet of the genome is a deeply recursive algorithm and Gödel proved that we can never reach the bottom of it. Genetics is the script and epigenetics is the actual performance of the metabolic symphony orchestra.
Biological systems are
- highly nonrandom(biochemically individual) and
- inherently contingent (critically dependent on unknown conditions).
August 2012
Quantum Signature
Star Trek speaks of measuring quantum signatures. Physicists also speak of them. I offer an example.
A morphine molecule travels through a blood vessel and eventually reaches the blood brain barrier (BBB). The brain must be protected and the BBB does that. There are cells called glia that are servants of the brain. The brain is the essential ball of neurons which lets us see, hear and taste and moves us on our random walk through the rugged fitness landscape.
So the morphine molecule shows up and a micro glial police officer says “hold on, have a seat over there and wait”. After a while, the morphine molecule becomes impatient and slips into the bathroom. He happens to have a bottle of vinegar with him. In bioscience, vinegar is called an acetyl group. The morphine molecule sticks two acetyl groups to himself thereby changing his quantum signature from morphine to heroin (diacetyl morphine). He walks out of the bathroom, the glial cop sniffs him briefly and says, “okay you can go on into the brain”. And so begins a disease.
The Heroin molecule wanders around and eventually stumbles across a special receptor, the endorphin receptor.
The Metabolic Symphony Orchestra.
I ascend from the depths of sleep. It is as if the dreams fade behind a curtain. The music changes but never stops. All the players in the metabolic Symphony Orchestra (MSO) are in unison. I know this because I am in the control room. During the night, a foot might complain of being cold and requests help, easy jobs like that, a flip, a blanket toss. Check the clock, maybe think about bottom-up design and slip back into dreamland. I am so happy that someone else is conducting the MSO. And who is that? It is the quantum mind.
There is more processing power in the zygote of Drosophila melanogaster (a fruit fly) than in all the computers on the planet connected together. The quantum mind is invisible. We take it completely for granted.
I slipped through the doors of my favorite restaurant. Outside the air is dark and chilled. The warm humid air of the day now paints everything with a misty brush. I am good with that.
I have been rattling around inside my head all day. That never really stops though.
I think of the phase state transition of water as it goes from vapor to liquid and on, in maybe a month or so, to fluffy snowflakes or stone cold ice.
Remember the grade school conundrum when the teacher asked, “which came first the chicken or the egg”? But then, she never provides the answer. Eventually you realize she does not know herself. Later on in a physics class I learned the phase state transition concept. It explains how things like water molecules can go through phase changes and simultaneously absorb or release energy.
I realized that the answer is, “neither came first” The chicken and the egg are merely different phase states of the same thing. Neither came first. Life came first. Voila! Done with that mystery!
But now back to the restaurant. The bricks in the sidewalk are drinking up the heat of the day and are letting the water vapor rest, perchance giving a drink to a flower or a tree or a tiny ant.
But let’s move on into the restaurant. It is like the ancient metaphor of the Israelites. I am standing at the Tower of Babel. Almost nothing is comprehensible. Verbal data streams swirl around collide, transgress, digress and yes also regress. Somebody just spilled her wine and a momentary bubble of quietude entraps me. And then the incomprehensible Babel resumes.
I see the face of my best friend, her smile is almost blinding. My mind quits bumping around inside itself and orders me to approach. We slide into adjacent barstools. Our favorite bartender leaps into action and hands us menus. The background Babel evaporates like a wet towel in the Arizona sunshine. All goes quite well. It is after all a well practiced food and beverage symphony. We can chatter together like two parakeets discussing the meaning of life and not worrying about heat regulation, blood pressure regulation or where to store our arms and legs. Eventually we get a message to quit eating and drinking and ask for the check.
So who is in charge? To which I reply the quantum mind.
Imagine you are a cute blue Basophil (a kind of white blood cell. WBC’s are like the immune police). Inside you are globs of blue histamine. You my cute little basophil have the power to create a welt or a runny nose when the brain foolishly decides to eat a peanut or runaround in a field of ragweed. If you could, you might ask will he ever learn? Has anyone noticed that the brain is capable of making the same mistakes over and over and over again.
The quantum mind is a cluster of 100 billion quantum processors who are connected through a vast network of signaling molecules each with unique quantum signatures.
The processors are eukaryotic cells.
The quantum mind is the intelligence behind intelligent design.
The quantum mind lives both inside but mostly outside the central nervous system.
The quantum mind is the conductor of the metabolic Symphony Orchestra.
The quantum mind owns emotion.
Mental illness is not contained only in the cranium.
The central nervous system thinks that it is in charge. That is its neurosis. The ignition of cognition predates the central nervous system.
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