Revitalizing Science

my latest project is a book

Feb 07, 2025

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We’ve all heard at least something about “quantum biology”. Living things make use of quantum tricks like tunneling and superposition to perform their magic. In one way, this is surprising; quantum effects are easy to see in isolated systems or ultra-cold materials, but we don’t expect them in the noisy, warm environment of a cell. In another way, it is entirely expected. Evolution is resourceful in looking for competitive advantages, and if there is a quantum trick or two that’s available, natural selection would reward any organism that finds and exploits it.

I’m writing a book in which the theme of quantum biology is extended to dizzying heights, explaining the alpha and omega of life. Life is a quantum phenomenon at every level, from the Big Bang — which seems to have been arranged “with life in mind”, to the origin of life, evolution and the maintenance of the living state.

These are big claims, and they require a bookful of evidence to make them plausible. Some of the evidence is esoteric, but most of it is hiding in plain sight. The book brings together topics from cosmology, physics, evolution, and cell biology to make its case.

Compared to non-living systems, life is able to do things that look like magic. I will claim that the magic is real — life plays by different rules. It’s not just that life is evolved to exploit quantum tricks; life is able to get inside the quantum probabilities, driving molecular processes that would be unlikely verging on impossible otherwise.

According to standard quantum theory, the recipe for the future comes exactly 50% from the state of the system in the present and 50% from pure randomness. My hypothesis is that this is true in non-living systems, but the way life “works” is that the “randomness” isn’t random; it is guided in a way that maintains the life of an organism. The life force is not just within each individual, but serves a larger purpose in guiding evolution over the long haul.

The evidence for this thesis comes from diverse fields of science, and each will be explored in a full chapter. Here is a teaser, hinting at the content:

From 1979 to 2007, Robert Jahn and Brenda Dunne ran a series of experiments in parapsychology in the basement of the Princeton Engineering Building. Dr Jahn was an aerospace engineer with a PhD in physics, and Dean of the Engineering School at the start of this period. With meticulous precision and conservative analysis, they established the central principle that human intention — in the abstract without any “physical” contact — is able to affect the probabilities that quantum physics treats as “random”.
Scientists used to think that the laws of physics were arbitrary rules handed to us by nature, and that life is an opportunistic exploiter of whatever those laws happen to be. But beginning in the 1970s, physicists noticed that those laws have to be rather special in many ways in order for life to be possible. Numbers like the speed of light and the mass of the electron are constrained within small tolerance by the requirement that the universe is capable of supporting life. One interpretation is that life is the raison d’être for this universe.
Quantum physics is formulated as equations about what happens between “observations”. The output is a probability that connects the next observation to previous observations. But physicists have been arguing for 100 years about what constitutes an “observation”. A radically conservative idea is that “observation” means becoming known to a living being. This framing is radical because it places biology at the very foundation of reality, alongside the laws of physics. It is conservative because most of the luminaries of quantum science advocated this view — from Max Planck to John von Neumann to Eugene Wigner to David Bohm.
How did life begin on earth? In the 1820s, the first organic molecules were synthesized from inorganic matter. In the 1950s, some building blocks of life — amino acids — were synthesized in a lab environment that was designed to simulate conditions in the atmosphere of primeval earth. It looked as though the origin of life would soon be understandable in terms of known chemistry and physics. But since that time, no progress has been made toward synthesizing a minimal self-reproducing system that could be a starting point for Darwinian evolution. The minimal system seems to be far too complicated to have arisen by chance.
Plants can learn and remember. Protozoa seem to store information in one cell for which vertebrates like us would (presumably) require brains. Flatworms can be trained, and after their heads are cut off, their tail grows a new head that remembers the training. Monarch butterflies “remember” the migration path of their great, great grandparents. All these examples point to biological information that is outside of nerves and maybe outside of the physical body altogether.
There are thousands of stories by people who claim to have had personal encounters with space aliens. Almost all of them report that the space aliens share a lot of anatomy with humans — walking upright on two legs, face with two eyes on top and a mouth underneath. But if these creatures truly evolved on a distant planet, wouldn’t we expect them to be very different from us? There are two possibilities: (1) These reports are all human fantasies, the product of our impoverished imaginations; or (2) There is a universal template for what kind of intelligent life is possible, and some kind of guiding intelligence or convergent evolutionary process that channels intelligent life in a humanoid direction.

All deep thinking scientists have acknowledged that the foundations of science are overdue for a make-over. But the particular make-over that I describe is anathema to most of them. Most but not all — I have fellow-travelers on this journey

Agents Under Fire: Materialism and the Rationality of Science (2004) by Angus Menuge. “defends a robust notion of agency and intentionality against eliminative and naturalistic alternatives, showing the interconnections between the philosophy of mind, and theology”
Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe (2010), by Robert Lanza and Bob Berman. Sequels, Beyond Biocentrism (2017), and The Grand Biocentric Design (2021). “The revolutionary view that life creates the universe instead of the other way around.”
Irreducible Mind (2009). Sequels: Beyond Physicalism (2017), and Consciousness Unbound: (2022) by Ed Kelly and Paul Marshall. “The vision sketched here provides an antidote to the prevailing postmodern disenchantment of the world and demeaning of human possibilities. It not only more accurately and fully reflects our human condition but engenders hope and encourages ego-surpassing forms of human flourishing.”
Why Materialism is Baloney (2014) by Bernardo Kastrup. “Foundations of metaphysical idealism. The deepest nature of reality is mental, not physical”
Irreducible (2024) by Federico Faggin. “Consciousness, at a quantum level, is the source of all physical reality.”

There are at least two good reasons why mainstream scientists would resist going in this direction.

First, there is a powerful tradition in mainstream science looking for causality from the bottom up. Influences take place between nearby objects, and any global patterns can be explained as “strong emergence”. Einstein didn’t like “spooky action at a distance”. David Bohm was the counterweight to the principle of locality, and he proposed that, in addition, physics included holistic patterns which he called the Implicate Order. The problem with this is that researching it is devilishly difficult. Scientists are used to isolating a system in a laboratory so they can study it under pure conditions. Once you allow for the possibility that the situation far away and long ago can influence your experimental result, you have to completely rethink the idea of a “controlled experiment”. And there may be “teleology” — goal states that are pulling from the future, as well as discoverable causes from the past. These are fundamental challenges to the scientific method.

Second, and even worse, is the principle of scientific objectivity. Our scientific culture is built on the idea that we can know the truth via replicability. If I report an experimental result from my lab and you try to do exactly the same thing in your lab but you find something different, you have every right to protest that I must have made a mistake. But in quantum mechanics, reality is created by a participatory process between observer and observed. For a hundred years, quantum physicists have coped with this by assuming that “observer” just means a particular experimental apparatus — something that you can copy when you replicate my experiment in your own lab. But what if an “observer” is a living being with intentions and expectations? The message of Jahn and Dunne (at the Princeton PEAR lab) is that the human mind can flip quantum probabilities without ever touching the apparatus.

If I am correct in the hypothesis of my book, it will require a new methodology for science and a new culture for our scientific community.

Unauthorized Science

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