Discussions about life and consciousness with Krista Lagus, Dwight Harris, Bill Ross, and Erik Jensen

There was a very entertaining and idea rich discussion with Krista Lagus (this), Dwight Harris, Bill Ross,and Erik Jensen at the FB page of Krista Lagus (see this) and also at my own FB page (see this).

Since the discussion stimulated several interesting observations and helped to add details to the formulation of my own views, I thought that it might be a good idea to summarize some of the basic points in order to not forget the new observations.

A. The topics discussed with Krista Lagus

We had an interesting discussion with Krista Lagus and I had an opportunity to explain the basic ideas of TGD inspired quantum view of consciousness and biology.

A.1 Touching

The discussion started from the post of Krista Lagus in which she talked about "quantum touch" meaning that physical touch would involve quantum effects, a kind of fusion of two quantum systems leading to entanglement.

In the attempt to understand what could happen in touch, the basic question is what living objects are. One of the key characteristics of a living system is coherence in the scale of an organism. Standard quantum theory does not support quantum coherence above molecular scales. What makes the living system coherent so that is more than mere molecular soup?

The guess is that quantum coherence at some, yet unidentified, level induces the coherence at the level of biomatter. Natural candidates are classical electromagnetic and gravitational fields. TGD leads to a new view of space-time and the notion of many-sheeted space-time with non-trivial topology in all scales. We see this non-trivial topology by bare eyes: the physical objects that we see around us correspond to space-time sheets. Also classical fields having long range have space-time correlates as topological field quanta: magnetic and electric flux quanta. One can speak of electric and magnetic bodies and also of gravitational magnetic bodies and they accompany biological bodies.

The second new TGD based element is that the field bodies carry phases of ordinary matter with non-standard and possibly very large values of effective Planck constant. The quantum coherence of field bodies induces the coherence of biomatter. Even the gravitational for the Earth and Sun and electric Planck constants for systems varying from DNA to Earth are involved and can be very large.

Also field bodies can touch each other and this would give rise to remote mental interactions. Also biological bodies can touch each other and this gives rise to a fusion of them as conscious entities, even in the scale of the organisms. Basically this touch would be at the level of field bodies in the scale of organisms. The formation of a monopole flux tube pair between two systems, be their molecules or organisms or their field bodies, would be a universal mechanism of touch. U-shaped tentacles for the two systems would reconnect (by touching) and form a flux tube pair connecting the systems. This mechanism would be behind biocatalysis and the immune system.

A. 2 Could statistical averaging have an analog at the level of conscious experience?

Krista Lagus criticized my proposal that the statistical averaging crucial for the applications of quantum theory could have an analog at the level of conscious experience.

The motivation for the statistical averaging at the level of sensory experiences of *subselves* determining mental images is that in absence of it the sensory experience is highly fluctuating if the outcomes of single SFR determines it. The averaging would do at the level of conscious experience the same as in quantum computations. At the level of self this would not occur.

Subself should correspond to an ensemble of nearly identical subselves or temporal sequence (ensemble as a time crystal made possible by classical non-determinism behind "small" SFRs) of states of single subself. I remember that there is evidence that this kind of temporal averaging takes place and I have even written of it. A good example is provided by the sensory organ defining a subself consisting of sensory receptors as its subselves. Color summation would reflect this kind of conscious averaging.

There is however an objection against this argument. There are two kinds of SFRs: "big" and "small" ones. In "big" SFRs as counterparts of ordinary quantum measurements the state of the system can change radically and also the arrow of geometric time changes in the TGD Universe. In a "small" ones, whose sequence is the TGD counterpart for a sequence of repeated measurements of the same observables, the changes are small and one might argue in this case the argument requiring a conscious counterpart for the statistical averaging does not hold true.

A.3. The importance of geometry

What follows is my reaction to the earlier comment of Krista Lagus mentioning the importance of geometry. Certainly the environment is important. Highly symmetric geometry favours resonances and if classical electromagnetic is involved, this can be important.

Suppose that the creation of connection to the electric and gravitational magnetic bodies is a prerequisite for achieving a higher level of consciousness (alpha rhythm of 10 Hz and gamma rhythm of 40 Hz are examples). This would require generation of particles with a large value of h_eff serving as a measure for algebraic complexity and scale of quantum coherence.

Suppose that the formation of OH-O^- +dark proton qubits occurs and takes dark protons to the gravitational magnetic body and involves Pollack effect and its generalizations. This creates negatively charged regions as exclusion zones and strong electric fields so that also electric bodies become important (note that DNA has constant density of negative charge). Large negative electric charges increase the value of electric Planck constant. I had not noticed this, a trivial fact as such, earlier.

Quartz crystals are believed to induce altered states of consciousness and I have a personal experience of this. One could think that dark protons are transferred from quartz crystals (quartz is everywhere) to gravitational magnetic bodies and generate negative charge generating large scale electric quantum coherence. The geometry of holy buildings involves sharp tips (church towers). Also pyramids have sharp tips and highly symmetric geometry favouring resonances. In the presence of charge, these tips involve strong electric fields characterized by large electric Planck constant (something new) generating quantum coherence (see this).

There is experimental evidence about strange phenomena associated with this kind of building: the last one was in Finland this Christmas and was a dynamical light pillar associated with a church. So called UFOs are the second familiar example assigned with lines of tectonic activity and could be seen as a plasmoid life form. Also crop circles involve light balls.

A.4 Bioharmony

In the TGD framework a model for music harmony led to the notion of icosahedral harmony. The Icosahedron has 12 vertices and 20 triangular faces. Also the octahedron and tetrahedron have triangular faces. 12-note scale can be represented as a Hamiltonian cycle at icosahedron and one can classify them by their symmetries: there are 3 types of them and combining 3 Hamiltonian cycles one obtains union of three harmonies with 20+20+20 3-chords identified as vertices of triangles. The surprising finding was that one can identify these 3-chords as 60 DNA codons and that the numbers of triangles related by symmetry of the cycle correspond to the number of DNAs coding for a given amino acid. The addition of a tetrahedron gives the tetrahedral cycle and this gives 64 DNA codons.

The interpretation would be that the chords correspond to triplets of dark photons providing a realization of the genetic code. Music represents and induces emotions so that the bioharmonies would represent moods at the molecular level. DNA would give 6-qubit code and represent also emotions.

What did not look nice was that both icosahedron and tetrahedron were needed. Much later I realized that hyperbolic 3-space H^3 central in TGD (3-surface of Minkowski space with constant light-cone proper time or 3-surface with constant cosmic time) allows a completely unique tessellation (lattice) consisting of tetrahedrons, octahedrons and icosahedrons: usually only one Platonic solid is possible. This tessellation appears in various scales and genetic code could be a universal manner to represent information and would be realized in many scales in biology and also outside biology.

To get idea about the evolution of these ideas see for instance this, this , this, and this .

B. Dwight Harris and parity violation

There was a comparison of views about consciousness and biology with Dwight Harris. One of his key ideas is the importance of chiral selection and this stimulated a concrete idea about how could be forced by holography=holomorphy principle of TGD, in the same way as matter antimatter asymmetry would be forced by it (see this).

Dwight Harris assumes that parity violation is necessary for conscious memory. In TGD, this is not the case. The notion of conscious memory is an essential element of theories of quantum consciousness but standard QM does not allow it. In TGD the situation changes due to the replacement of the standard ontology of QM with what I call zero energy ontology.

Parity violation manifesting itself as a chiral selection is however essential for biological life. Chiral selection is a mystery in the standard model in which parity violation is extremely small above intermediate gauge boson Compton length L_w of order 10^-17 meters. Weak bosons are however effectively massless below L_w and parity violation is large.

In the TGD framework the situation changes since large values of effective Planck constant scales up the scale of parity violation. Dark weak bosons are massless below the scale (h_eff/h)×L_w so that for large enough h_eff the parity violation can be larger in scales of order cell size and even longer. This could explain the chiral selection.

A highly interesting question is whether the chiral selection caused to parity violation is essential for all forms of life: TGD indeed predicts that life is present in all scales and biological life is only one particular special case. Why would parity violation be unavoidable? Why would the states with different chiralities have different energies?

Or could the explanation be at a much deeper level and based on holography=holomorphy principle? Could this principle allow only the second chirality. Complex conjugation is analogous to reflection. Could different chiralities be like analytic function f(z) and its conjugate f*(z*) For a given space-time region only one of these is possible. The glove cannot be simultaneously left- and right handed and the option with the minimal energy is selected.

I have already earlier proposed that holography=holomorphy principle forces matter antimatter asymmetry in the sense that the space-time surface decomposes to regions containing preferentially matter or antimatter (see for instance this).

C. Bill Ross and G-quadruples

The discussion with Bill Ross made me conscious of the notion of G-quadruples which I have certainly encountered but with any conscious response. I tried to get from the Wikipedia article (see this) some idea about what is involved.

There can be 4 separate short G-rich DNA strands, 2 DNA strands, which are looped so that there are 4 parallel strands, and a single strand which is doubly looped giving again locally 4 parallel strands. A kind of tangle is formed. Planar tetrads, G-quadruples, are formed between the 4 strand portions involving G letters each. For instance, the telomere regions contain these structures and they have biological functions. G-quadruples appear also elsewhere and seem to be important in the control of transcription of DNA.

I also understood that cations K⁺ stabilizing the system are between G-tetrads which can be formed in G-rich regions of DNA such as telomeres. There are pairs of cations. 2 negative carbonyls would mean 2 C=O^-:s. A Cooper pair of electrons would come into mind as Bill Ross suggested and these kinds of pairs are associated with aromatic rings. Bill Ross was especially interested in what TGD could say about the situation.

This is what I can say. Since phosphates containing O^- are there, and base pair for DNA strands corresponds to 3+3 6 dark codons, one would have a doubling of OH-O^- + dark proton qubits, that is 6+6=12 qubits per codon quadruplets.

This could increase quantum computational power possibly associated with the codon sequences. In quantum computation N bits is related with 2^N dimensional state space so that the doubling of qubits increase the dimension of state space by factor 2 although state function reductions halting the computation give rise to a state characterized by N bits but in a basic which depends on the observables measured.

There is an interesting analogy related to beta sheets of proteins. Each amino-acid would define a qubit associated with the COOH part. N parallel protein folds would increase the number of qubits by N. Could proteins of beta sheets perform quantum computations?

D. Erik Jensen and the two meanings of purification

Erik Jensen talked about purification as a process of purifying the mind. It is amusing that purification and distillation are terms used in quantum computationalism for the generation of pure states from mixed states, which are non-pure because they have entanglement with the environment so that a density matrix must be used to describe them. I learned just yesterday that without so-called magic states produced by distillation this), quantum computation could do only what classical computation can do. Meditation is usually seen as an attempt to reduce the attachment to the external world. Could the physical meaning of this be that it makes genuine quantum computational processes possible! Enlightenment as a transition from classical to quantum computation!;-)

For a summary of earlier postings see Latest progress in TGD.

For the lists of articles (most of them published in journals founded by Huping Hu) and books about TGD see this.