Guest Post of Thought Provoker

Thought Provoker, the internet moniker of an individual I first encountered at Telic Thoughts, is hosting this guest post. Sometimes referred to as TP, Thought Provoker has previously authored guest posts at Telic Thoughts. Guest posts are the brainchild of Mike Gene and it looks like I have gone into the adoption business.

TP has his own blog appropriately known as Thought Provoker. Guest posts of TP at Telic Thoughts can be viewed here.

The usual disclaimers apply. This post reflects the views of TP and not anyone else at Intelligently Sequenced. As is the case with all ideas we may agree or disagree with points made in the essay. TP's post follows:


Allow me to introduce myself. I am Thought Provoker. Bradford has been kind enough to offer to allow me a Guest Post on Intelligently Sequenced. This is remarkable because, more often than not, Bradford and I have disagreed in Telic Thoughts. I think this speaks highly of Bradford.

I won't guarantee everyone will agree with my post but I offer it in an attempt to provoke constructive thinking by suggesting a new choice in approaching Intelligent Design. I call it the Third Choice.

The Third Choice is primarily a model offered by the scientists Penrose and Hameroff that I have tailored for use as an ID hypothesis. Sir Rodger Penrose is famous for modeling Black Holes along with Stephen Hawking. Penrose joined forces with Dr. Hameroff who has studied cellular biology and made the study of consciousness his life's work. They call their model the Orchestrated Objective Reduction model of consciousness (Orch OR for short).

This post will be a very brief introduction/summary. I would suggest visiting www.hameroff.com for more details. However, even though it is a summary some non-trivial subjects have to be addressed first, including cosmology and quantum physics.

A key concept to understanding the Third Choice is to realize General Relativity is the observed reality. Special Relativity is NOT reality. It is incomplete. There is a single, inertial frame of reference. This means our universe exhibits Minkowskian Geometry (not Euclidean Geometry). From Einstein’s Ether: Why did Einstein Come Back to the Ether?...
"In (1905) Einstein constructed a relativity theory that was based on the assertion that the ether was superfluous. In 1908 Minkowski formulated the theory of the “absolute world”. The nineteenth century ether no longer existed. A new kind of ether (space-time) came into being. One could keep on maintaining the ether, and at the same time strip it of the notion of absolute rest. Einstein seemed to agree, and after 1916 he returned to the ether. In 1920 he combined Minkowski’s absolute world concept and Mach’s ideas on rotational movements…"

Minkowskian Space-time is reality. Three dimensional Euclidean Geometry is not. Calculating Minkowskian distances ("dl") adheres to the following equation...
dl^2 = dx^2 + dy^2 + dz^2 - dt^2
Photons (traveling at the speed of light) have a Minkowskian distance of ZERO. Quantum "paradoxes" like GHZ states are trivial to understand for photons since they can be anywhere and anywhen instantly.

This provides an understanding of how any and all quantum effects can be interconnected regardless of distances in space-time. Hopefully, it can be understood that they not only can be interconnected but that they are interconnected.

While there may be resistance to the implications of this, the alternatives are not that attractive. Either we continue to wait for physicists to come up with a better idea (they have been waiting for eight decades) or we embrace a metaphysical concept called Many Worlds.
Once it is realized that quantum effects are interconnected, it is a short hop to realizing there is no such thing as randomness. A lack of randomness wasn't a problem when Newtonian Physics was king. The only possible sources for randomness are quantum effects and conscious decisions.

If quantum effects are interconnected, their randomness is an illusion. Quantum effects are non-deterministic but they are also not random. What if consciousness is also interconnected with quantum effects?

This would explain quantum physic's measurement problem. The observer doesn't "randomly" decide which measurement to take. Conscious decisions are interconnected with the quantum effects being measured. The implication of this is that the appearance of randomness in living organisms is a direct artifact of quantum effects.

Sounds good in theory, but is there evidence of life even using quantum effects?
"Early in 2007 a team of Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley researchers identified quantum mechanical effects as the key to the astonishing ability of photosynthesis to utilize nearly all the photons absorbed by the leaves of green plants. Now a different team has found new evidence that points to a closely packed pigment-protein complex of the photosystem as the key to those quantum mechanical effects.
...
How nature manages to pull off this stunt was a long-standing mystery until the spring of 2007, when a study led by Graham Fleming, Deputy Director of Berkeley Lab and a UC Berkeley chemistry professor, found the first direct evidence of what he calls a 'remarkably long-lived wavelike electronic quantum coherence.'" link

While it is tempting to end the discussion here, quantum based photosynthesis doesn't explain how consciousness is interconnected to quantum effects (the final piece to solve the quantum measurement problem).

Single-celled organisms avoid obstacles and predators, find food and engage in sex. How are they able to accomplish this? An obvious presumption is that the cell's cytoskeleton performs the combined function of skeleton, muscle and nervous system. The cytoskeleton is made up of microtubules and actin. Microtubules (MTs) are made up of tubulin dimers that have two states, alpha and beta. If the alpha and beta states of these small tubulins (8 nm by 4 nm by 5 nm) can be in quantum superposition, it would provide an explanation for how the actions of living organisms are directly interconnected to quantum effects.

It is reasonable to presume that tubulins are capable of being in quantum position since similar sized fluorofullerenes exhibit quantum behavior. link

However, this is once again a situation where something can happen but it is questionable whether it does happen. DNA provides another possible example of life directly using quantum effects. A scientist named Patel has pointed out the search function inherent in the DNA is a quantum process requiring superposition link

Life's direct dependency on quantum physics has become obvious in the case of photosynthesis. It is also likely for DNA. While the case for microtubules is harder to make right now, too many observations are explained by it to dismiss it out of hand, IMO.