Speaker 1: I want you to picture, just for a second, the
absolute cutting edge of human engineering.
Speaker 2: Oh, like the really big stuff.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, the kind of technological triumph that completely defines
our era right now. So imagine the smartest minds of
places like Google or IBM and all these top tier
research universities all over the planet, right, the.
Speaker 2: People with basically unlimited budgets exactly.
Speaker 1: I mean they are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars
into building these quantum computers. And to make these machines
actually function, to just keep them stable for a fleeting
fraction of a second, they have to build these massive
room sized dilution refrigerators, which is.
Speaker 2: You know, a monumental engineering feed.
Speaker 1: On its own, It really is. Because they are forced
to cool these superconducting quantum chips down to zero point
zero one five kelvin. I mean we were talking about
minus four hundred and fifty nine degrees.
Speaker 2: Fahrenheit that is, I mean, that's an environment colder than
the actual vacuum of deep space, right.
Speaker 1: And it doesn't stop there. They have to seal these
chips inside intense vacuums and like layer them in all
this heavy radiation shielding.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they have to damp in literally every conceivable physical vibration.
Speaker 1: In the room exactly and block out any stray electromagnetic noise. Yeah,
all of that incredible brute force isolation just to coax
a handful of artificial quibits into maintaining a quantum state
long enough to run like a single calculation.
Speaker 2: It's honestly exhausting just thinking about it totally.
Speaker 1: But now I want you to just look out your
window at an ordinary blade of grass, or look at
an oat plant, or you know, honestly, just look down
at your own hands. Right now.
Speaker 2: How are you going with this?
Speaker 1: Well, what if that exact same mind bending engineering problem,
the one that requires Google to build a sub zero
vacuum fortress, what if that was fundamentally solved by nature
billions of years ago.
Speaker 2: I mean, if that's true, it demands a complete structural
rewrite of how we understand biology itself.
Speaker 1: And that is exactly why we are here today. Welcome
to Thrilling Threads. We are so incredibly glad you are
joining us for this.
Speaker 2: It's going to be a really wild ride today.
Speaker 1: It really is. Okay, let's unpack this. Our mission for
this analysis is to go through this absolutely staggering stack
of recent papers that just drop.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and these aren't just fringe blogs. These are from
the most rigorous scientific journals on the planet.
Speaker 1: Right, We're looking at breakthrough research from Nature, from Science Advances,
and from Oxford Academic and the core revelation connecting all
of this peer reviewed work is going to fundamentally shift
the paradigm of how you view yourself and.
Speaker 2: Really how you view the entire biosphere you inhabit.
Speaker 1: Exactly because the bottom line we are exploring today is
this ordinary proteins inside living cells are running massive quantum
computations at room temperature, which.
Speaker 2: For the longest time, the established laws of physics suggested
was just a literal impossibility.
Speaker 1: Oh totally impossible. So to really grasp the magnitude of
what biology is doing here, we have to look mechanistically
at why human made quantum computers are so incredibly fragile.
Speaker 2: Right, And it all really comes down to this concept
called decoherence ecoherence.
Speaker 1: Okay, break that down for us. I think that sounds
super intimidating.
Speaker 2: It does, but it's basically the great enemy of quantum computing.
So to understand why it happens, we have to look
at what a quantum state actually is, right, like.
Speaker 1: The difference between a regular computer bit and a quantum
bit exactly.
Speaker 2: So in your laptop, a classical bit is just a
physical switch. It's either a one or a zero. But
a quantum bit or equibit can exist in a superposition.
Speaker 1: A superposition that's where it's like both at the same time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a complex probability wave where it is basically
both one and zero simultaneously. And what's wild is that
multiple quibits can become entangled.
Speaker 1: Oh, entanglement, that's the spooky action at a distance stuff.
Speaker 2: Exactly. It means their wave functions are inextricably linked across space.
And this is what allows for that massive exponential leap
in processing.
Speaker 1: Power, because you aren't just calculating one path at a
time anymore, right, You.
Speaker 2: Are calculating every possible path simultaneously within that entire wave function. Right.
But and here's the catch. The wave function is essentially
a really really delicate phase relationship. So it's fragile, incredibly fragile.
The very moment that quantum system interacts with a chaotic
outside environment.
Speaker 1: It breaks, like if a stray photon hits it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, stray photon, or even if it just gets jostled
by the thermal vibration of a neighboring atom, that phase
relationship gets totally.
Speaker 1: Scrambled and the whole thing just collapses exactly.
Speaker 2: The wave function collapses, the superposition is completely destroyed, and
the system just reverts back to boring classical deterministic physics.
That process of collapse, that is decoherence.
Speaker 1: Okay, wow. So if the collapse of the wave function
is triggered by environmental interaction, and especially by heat, which
is really just the kinetic energy of atoms vibrating around.
Speaker 2: Right, Heat is just atomic jiggling.
Speaker 1: Then a living biolog cell seems like the absolute worst,
most hostile environment imaginable for a quantum state. I think
about it. A cell is essentially a microscopic boiling suit.
Speaker 2: Oh, it's incredibly chaotic.
Speaker 1: It's warm, it's wet, it's packed with ions creating all
this electrical noise, and you've got thousands of these massive
protein molecules just constantly slamming into each other.
Speaker 2: It's basically a war zone at the molecular level.
Speaker 1: Right. So, if keeping a human made quibot stable requires
cooling it to a fraction of a degree above absolute
zero just to stop all that atomic vibration. How on
Earth does a biological cell operating at like ninety eight
degrees fahrenheit manage to protect a quantum state.
Speaker 2: Well, this is where we really have to abandon all
of our human engineering biases, because in our laboratories, what
do we do. We build thick.
Speaker 1: Walls, We isolate things.
Speaker 2: Exactly, we try to conquer thermal noise by just freezing
it out. But nature has had four and a half
billion years to experiment with this.
Speaker 1: That is a lot of trial and error, it is.
Speaker 2: And what's fascinating here is that biology doesn't fight the chaos.
It actually mathematically integrates it.
Speaker 1: Wait, it uses the chaos.
Speaker 2: Yes, the researchers at Oxford in the University of Chicago
demonstrated that certain biological structures utilize a mechanism we can
call molecular shielding.
Speaker 1: Molecular shielding, but it's so much.
Speaker 2: More active than just like a physical barrier. You know
how Proteins are basically these long chains of amino.
Speaker 1: Acids, right, and they fold up into those crazy complex
three dimensional shapes.
Speaker 2: Exactly. What the researchers found is that certain proteins fold
in highly specific ways, where their hydrophobic cores create these
tiny geometrically isolated pockets.
Speaker 1: Like little safe rooms inside the protein.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they act almost like microscopic Faraday cages. But the
crazy part is they aren't just blindly blocking the noise.
Speaker 1: And what do they do.
Speaker 2: The unique vibrational frequencies of the surrounding protein scaffold actually
tune out the destructive thermal wavelengths, but at the same
time they allow specific to constructive resonant frequencies to pass
right through.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, that is a brilliant distinction. So it isn't
a static wall at all. It's more like a dynamic resonant.
Speaker 2: Filter, exactly, a highly tuned filter.
Speaker 1: So the protein structure is essentially absorbing the chaotic, random
thermal heat of the cell and filtering it down into
a specific rhythmic vibration.
Speaker 2: You got it, And that rhythmic vibration is actually used
to sustain the quantum state.
Speaker 1: Wait, really, the heat is sustaining it?
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's an active stabilization process. In quantum mechanics, it's
known as the quantum Zeno effect or continuous resonant driving.
Speaker 1: Okay, continuous resonant driving. That sounds intense.
Speaker 2: It is the thermal noise of the cell is channeled
by the geometry of the protein to continuously kick the
quantum system back into a state of coherence right as
it's about to decohere.
Speaker 1: That is unbelievable. It's like trying to balance a house
of cards on a roller coaster, but using the vibration
of the tracks to keep the cards standing.
Speaker 2: That is the perfect analogy. So the very heat and
vibration that instantly destroys a google superconducting quibot is actually
being harnessed by the biological protein. It's the resonant fuel
keeping its own quantum state alive.
Speaker 1: Okay, my mind is a little bit blown right now.
How do they even prove this?
Speaker 2: Well, the Oxford and Chicago teams prove this by taking
ordinary fluorescent proteins, like the exact same ones extracted from
jellyfish that scanned biology labs use every single day as
glowing genetic markers.
Speaker 1: The jellyfish proteins.
Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, and they demonstrated that the fluorophores inside these proteins,
we're functioning as entangled quibbots inside living, warm bacterial cells.
Speaker 1: Which completely forces a radical re evaluation of our baseline
assumptions about life. I mean, if a basic fluorescent protein
from a jellyfish is acting as a shielded quantum bit,
what is the upper limit of this?
Speaker 2: That is the billion dollar question.
Speaker 1: Right because if biology is running quantum computations, there has
to be a dedicated hardware architecture for it. Especially when
you get into more complex organisms.
Speaker 2: You would definitely expect to see specialized hardware.
Speaker 1: Exactly like in a silicon chip, the hardware is a
semiconductor lattice. So what is the actual physical material running
these calculations in a plant or you know, in the
human body.
Speaker 2: For that exact mechanism, we have to turn to a
really landmark twenty twenty five paper. It was published in
Science Advances by a physicist named Philip Kurrent.
Speaker 1: Okay Current's paper. I read through this and it is fascinating.
Speaker 2: It really is. Kerrent identified a specific biological molecule that
acts as the primary quantum hardware in living systems, and
it's an aromatic amino acid called trip to fan.
Speaker 1: Wait, trip to fan as in the amino acid everyone
blames for making you sleepy after eating Thanksgiving turkey.
Speaker 2: Yes, the exact same Thanksgiving Turkey trip to Fan.
Speaker 1: That is hilarious. Who would have thought?
Speaker 2: I know, right, But physicists are now looking at as
atomic structure, specifically it's indole ring with entirely.
Speaker 1: New scrutiny because there's something special about that ring structure exactly.
Speaker 2: This ring structure features a cloud of delocalized pie electrons,
and these electrons are incredibly sensitive to ultraviolet light and
electromagnetic fields.
Speaker 1: Okay, so it's a very sensitive molecule.
Speaker 2: Very but Kerrent found that the real magic doesn't happen
when trip devan is just floating around freely in.
Speaker 1: The cell right in eats structure.
Speaker 2: Yes, the quantum computation only emerges when these triptopan molecules
are arranged in a highly specific repeating geometry inside the cell.
Speaker 1: And that specific geometry is found inside these things called microtubules.
Speaker 2: Correct, exactly, microtubules.
Speaker 1: I've always seen these described as basically the skeletal system
of the cell. Like they are these long, hollow, cylindrical
tubes made of a protein called tubulin.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they literally give a cell its shape and they
act as little railway tracks for transporting materials around.
Speaker 1: But they're also everywhere, right, like ubiquitous.
Speaker 2: Oh completely, every plant, every animal, and crucially, every single
one of the roughly eighty six billion neurons in the
human brain is packed with the dense network of these microtubules.
Speaker 1: Okay, so that structural ubiquity is definitely key here.
Speaker 2: It is because when tubulin proteins assembled to these microtubule cylinders,
the trip to fan molecules embedded within them end up
being spaced out at exact nanimeter intervals. Us.
Speaker 1: It's not random, it's a highly ordered structure.
Speaker 2: Right. They form this perfect repeating helical lattice, and current
discovered that when you hit this lattice with energy, the
trip to fan molecules don't just absorb and emit light individually.
Speaker 1: Because they're too perfectly spaced for that.
Speaker 2: Exactly, because of their precise geometric spacing, their electron clouds
literally couple together. They undergo a massive quantum entanglement phenomenon
known as Dick superradiance.
Speaker 1: Okay, superradiance that is one of those concepts in quantum
electro dynamics that just sounds incredibly abstract when you first
hear it.
Speaker 2: It definitely sounds like sci fi jargon.
Speaker 1: It really does, but the mechanics of it are absolutely fascinating.
Instead of using that old cliche of you know, a
choire suddenly singing in perfect unison, let's look at it
through the lens of classical synchronization.
Speaker 2: Oh, like the pendulum clocks, Yes.
Speaker 1: Exactly, like that famous pendulum clock experiment. If you mount
one hundred ticking pendulum clocks on a single flexible wall
and you just start them all swinging completely randomly, it's
just chaotic noise.
Speaker 2: Right, they're all out of phase.
Speaker 1: But over time, the tiny amounts of kinetic energy transferring
through that flexible wall cause the pendulums to actually influence
each other, and eventually, through that shared resonance, all one
hundred pendulums will spontaneously lock into perfect synchronized swinging.
Speaker 2: It's mesmerizing to watch videos of that, by the.
Speaker 1: Way, it really is. And super radiance is essentially the
quantum equivalent of that, but happening at the speed of light.
Speaker 2: That is a really excellent mechanistic analogy. So in quantum
super radiance, the pendulums or the clocks are the delocalized
electrons in that trip to fen lattice.
Speaker 1: Okay, and what's the flexible wall.
Speaker 2: The wall is the electromagnetic field that they all share.
So when they sync up, the millions of separate trip
defen molecules completely stop behaving as individual separate particles.
Speaker 1: Wait, they merge.
Speaker 2: Yeah, their wave functions physically merge. They become a single,
unified macroscopic quantum entity that.
Speaker 1: Is terrifying and beautiful all at once.
Speaker 2: I know. They start absorbing and emitting photons not randomly
but collectively with a squared intensity, and its speeds that
are just mathematically breathtaking.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's get into those speeds, because here's where it
gets really interesting, where currents paper moves from just fascinating
biology into like extreme physics.
Speaker 2: Oh definitely.
Speaker 1: If we look at normal human neurobiology, a neuron firing
an action potential, which is the electrical pulse that travels
down the axon, which is what.
Speaker 2: We classically think of is the speed of human thought.
Speaker 1: Right, that operates at a maximum of about one thousand
times per second. So one thousand operations per second is
the baseline of our biological hardware under the old paradise.
Speaker 2: Correct, that's the classical speed limit.
Speaker 1: So what is the clock speed of this new trip
to fan super radiant network.
Speaker 2: Well, Current's measurements show that the quantum super radiant processes
inside these microtubule networks are operating at between one trillion
and ten trillion operations per second.
Speaker 1: I just I need a second to process that. We're
jumping from one thousand operations per second to ten trillion.
Speaker 2: It's an unfathomable leap.
Speaker 1: That isn't just a hardware upgrade. That is a fundamental
phase shift in how we understand biological information processing.
Speaker 2: Absolutely.
Speaker 1: But you know what struck me most in Current's paper
wasn't just that raw number of ten trillion, because big
numbers are just big numbers. It was his observation that
this processing speed is actually pushing up against the absolute
theoretical limits of physics itself.
Speaker 2: Yes, specifically the Marglis Levitten limit.
Speaker 1: Exactly. Can you explain that limit for us?
Speaker 2: Sure?
Speaker 1: So?
Speaker 2: The Marglist levit In limit is a foundational principle in
quantum information theory. It basically dictates the maximum rate in
which any physical system can move from one quantum.
Speaker 1: State to another based on how much energy it has.
Speaker 2: Right exactly, It's based on the amount of energy available
to that system. So it is the hard unbreakable physical
ceiling for computation in our entire universe. Wow, you literally
cannot build a computer, whether you build it out of
silicon or a superconducting aluminum, or even biological tissue that
calculates faster than this limit allows for a given energy state.
Speaker 1: And Kurrent found that biology is hitting that limit.
Speaker 2: Yes, Current's data indicates that the trip to fan networks
inside living cells are operating within two orders of magnitude
of this absolute universal limit.
Speaker 1: That is staggering.
Speaker 2: It is. It means life isn't just stumbling along using inefficient,
sloppy chemistry. It actually optimized its information processing to the
very edge of what the laws of physics will permit.
Speaker 1: It makes complete sense why SETH. Lloyd, who is a
massive pioneer of quantum computing over at MIT. It makes
sense why he publicly praised this research so much.
Speaker 2: Yes, commentary on this was really pointed.
Speaker 1: It was Lloyd pointed out that we as humans have
been incredibly arrogant. We look at our massive supercomputers and
we think, oh, we have mastered computation, and then we
look at a patch of moss as this primitive, slow
moving organism.
Speaker 2: Right, just a simple little green thing on a rock.
Speaker 1: But Lloyd explicitly stated that the computational power performed by
living biological systems is vastly more powerful than anything artificial
we have ever created. Period.
Speaker 2: The quantum architecture of a single leaf is literally running
calculations that would crash our most advanced mainframes.
Speaker 1: It's just a humbling realization.
Speaker 2: Honestly, it is deeply humbling. Yeah, and it actually becomes
even more humbling when you apply that local single cell
calculation to a global historical scale.
Speaker 1: Right, because Current didn't just stop at measuring a single microtubule.
Speaker 2: No, he wanted to understand the cosmic footprint of this
biological computation.
Speaker 1: So what did he do.
Speaker 2: He ran a calculation to estimate the total quantum computational
capacity of all carbon based life across Earth's entire four
point five billion year history.
Speaker 1: I spent a lot of time looking at his methodology
for this, because, honestly, it sounds almost impossible to calculate.
Speaker 2: It's a massively complex extrapolation, it really is.
Speaker 1: But he essentially took the super radiant processing speeds, so
those trillions of operations per second, and he multiplied it
by the estimated density of microtubules in cellular life.
Speaker 2: Right, and then extrapolated that across the estimated biomass of
Earth over deep.
Speaker 1: Time exactly, so he included every single bacterium in the
primordial oceans, every fungus in the soil, every blade of grass,
every forest, every insect, and every mammal that has ever lived.
Speaker 2: The scope of it is just wild.
Speaker 1: And what was the mathematical result of that extrapolation? Because
it's genuinely difficult to conceptualize, It is.
Speaker 2: Current estimated that the combined cumulative quantum computational power of
life on Earth across its entire history, actually approaches the
computational capacity of the observable universe itself.
Speaker 1: I want to pause and make sure we are translating
that clearly for you listening, Because the concept of the
universe having a computational capacity is kind of wild. It
comes from theoretical physics, right.
Speaker 2: Yes, from ideas like the Beckenstein bound and the holographic principle.
Speaker 1: Right. These ideas suggest that the universe itself can actually
be quantified by how much information it can store and process.
Speaker 2: Exactly. The universe is, in a way an information system.
Speaker 1: And Kurrent is stating that the collective biological processing of
our single tiny planet over four billion years, rivals the
total informational capacity of the cosmos.
Speaker 2: We definitely must be incredibly precise here, though, to avoid
stepping into pure mysticism or pseudoscience.
Speaker 1: Oh for sure, we need to ground this.
Speaker 2: Right, because Kurrent is not claiming that the Earth's biosphere
is the universe, or that life is literally projecting the
cosmos like a hologram. Okay, good, This is a rigorous
mathematical comparison of information processing bounds. What he is demonstrating
is that biology's cumulative computation operates on a scale that
is undeniably cosmologically significant.
Speaker 1: Right. We are so used to thinking of life as
this rare, fragile little mold growing on a wet rock
in the vast dead emptiness of space.
Speaker 2: Exactly, But mathematically, the biosphere is an incredibly dense, immensely
powerful quantum computing engine that registers on a universal scale.
Speaker 1: It's no wonder. Kurrent himself departed from that standard, dry
academic language when he reviewed his own data.
Speaker 2: Yeah, scientists rarely use emotional language in these papers, but
he did.
Speaker 1: He literally called the finding on inspiring. He noted how
profoundly moving. It is that biology gets to play such
a monumental role in the physical mechanics of reality.
Speaker 2: When a hard nosed quantum physicist starts invoking words like awe,
you know the paradigm is fundamentally shifting.
Speaker 1: I mean, when a quantum physicist starts using words like awe,
doesn't that fundamentally shift how we view the hierarchy of life.
We usually look at a bleed of grass, it's just
simple biology, but mathematically it's a node in a universal
scale supercomputer.
Speaker 2: It absolutely changes how we interact with the natural world.
If you walk through a forest today, you aren't just
walking through a collection of slow chemical reactions anymore. You
are literally standing inside a massively parallel room temperature quantum supercomputer.
Speaker 1: It's breathtaking and recognizing that this architecture exists is obviously
the first step. But science is rapidly moving to the
second step, which is harnessing it.
Speaker 2: Yes, that's where things get.
Speaker 1: Really practical, because if we can't build a quantum computer
that works at room temperature, but a random oat plant can,
how do we bridge that gap?
Speaker 2: Well, the bridge is actually being built right now at
Oxford University. Through this methodology called directed evolution.
Speaker 1: Okay, directed evolution, how does that work?
Speaker 2: So the researchers understood that human minds and even our
current AI systems simply lack the capacity to design a
protein from scratch that can fold perfectly enough to shield
a quantum state.
Speaker 1: Because it's just too complicated, way too complicated.
Speaker 2: The spatial requirements, the vanderwalls forces, the resonant frequency tuning.
It is just too complex to engineer from the top down.
Speaker 1: So what's the workaround.
Speaker 2: We don't need to build it from scratch because the
oat plant already has the blueprint. So they just took
a protein from a simple oatplant and subjected it to
directed evolution.
Speaker 1: Ah, So they let nature do the heavy lifting exactly.
Speaker 2: They introduced rapid accelerated mutations in the lab, and they
essentially selected generation after generation for proteins that exhibited longer
and more stable quantum coherence times.
Speaker 1: Wow. So they essentially put the protein on this intense
evolutionary treadmill.
Speaker 2: That's a great way to put it.
Speaker 1: They artificially sped up millions of years of natural selection
into just a few weeks, and they were selecting strictly
for quantum efficiency, right, and the.
Speaker 2: Final result of that directed evolution is a brand new
engineered biological structure that they named MAG two.
Speaker 1: MAG two. And what does it do.
Speaker 2: Mag two is a biological quantum sensor, and because its
quantum state is so perfectly shielded yet so exquisitely sensitive
to specific external stimuli, it can actually detect single magnetic
field changes at the foundational cellular level.
Speaker 1: That's incredible.
Speaker 2: It is literally a microscopic, living quantum magnetometer.
Speaker 1: You know. Gabriel Abraham's who is one of the lead
researchers on that MAG two project, he summarized this whole
approach so beautifully. He said, quote nature found a way
for us.
Speaker 2: That quote really perfectly captures it.
Speaker 1: It does, and it highlights a massive shift in the
philosophy of science because since the Industrial Revolution, the human
approach has always been one of mechanical domination, right well, completely.
Speaker 2: We isolate, we extract, we burn things, we build.
Speaker 1: Huge metal boxes to try and impose our will on physics.
But we hit a hard wall with quantum mechanics because
the quantum realm is just too delicate for brute force.
Speaker 2: Can't bully equiv.
Speaker 1: It exactly, you can't bully ekibit. So the development of
mag Tu really shows that the future of advanced technology
isn't about conquering nature anymore. It is about collaborating with
the ancient embedded intelligence of biology.
Speaker 2: If we connect this to the bigger picture, it is
a massive transition from synthetic engineering to biological partnership. We're
finally learning to actually speak the quantum language that organic
life has been using for eons.
Speaker 1: It's like trying to invent the wheel from scratch, struggling
for decades in a lab and then walking outside and
realizing your backyard is just full of ferraris that just
need the keys turned.
Speaker 2: That is exactly what it feels like.
Speaker 1: And while engineering sensors out of oat plants is revolutionary
for technology, the implications become far far more intimate when
we turn that lens inward.
Speaker 2: Because we have to talk about the human brain.
Speaker 1: Yes, we do, because, as we established earlier, this exact
same quantum architecture, these microtubule networks backing millions of trip
to fan molecules, is extremely dense inside the human brain, which.
Speaker 2: Brings us to one of the most heavily debated and
honestly controversial theories in the entire history of neuroscience.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, this has been a battleground for decades. We
are talking about the work of Sir Roger Penrose and
doctor Stewart Hamarov.
Speaker 2: Right, And just for context, Penrose is a legendary Oxford
mathematician who actually share the Nobel Prize in physics with
Stephen Hawking for his work on black holes.
Speaker 1: So he's not a lightweight, not at all.
Speaker 2: And Hammerof is an anesthesiologist from the University of Arizona,
and together over thirty years ago they proposed a theory
called orchestrated objective reduction or orc or ARE.
Speaker 1: Orch or ARE. Okay, let's dive into this. What is
the core idea here?
Speaker 2: Well, the audacity of orch or really cannot be overstated.
Classical neuroscience posits that consciousness is essentially just an emergent
property of complex computation.
Speaker 1: Right under the classical view, a neuron firing is basically
just a biological way transmitting an electrical signal.
Speaker 2: Exactly, And the assumption is that if you wire enough
of them together, like the eighty six billion in the
human brain, the sheer algorithmic complexity of all those wires
firing just somehow gives rise to consciousness.
Speaker 1: It's a purely deterministic classical physics.
Speaker 2: Model, yes, But Penrose and Hammeroff argue that classical physics
fundamentally lacks the mechanisms to produce subjective experience. You can't
get an inner life from the complex.
Speaker 1: Calculator, right, So what did they propose?
Speaker 2: They hypothesize that the electrical firing of neurons is merely
the macro level output. The actual seat of consciousness, they argued,
lies deep inside the neuron, within the quantum computations happening
inside the microtubules.
Speaker 1: And for three decades the mainstream scientific community just fiercely
rejected this, didn't they.
Speaker 2: Oh, they tore it apart. Prominent physicists publish paper after
paper claiming to completely debunk orch or R, and.
Speaker 1: The primary argument against it was always decoherence, right.
Speaker 2: Always, they ran these calculations suggesting that the warm, wet
environment of the brain would cause any quantum state in
a microtubule to collapse in a fraction of a fentosecond.
Speaker 1: Which is way too fast to influence in neural firing,
let alone generate human consciousness.
Speaker 2: Exactly the establishment viewed biological quantum processing as a literal
physical impossibility.
Speaker 1: But that consensus was built on the assumption that biological
molecules obey the same thermal degradation rules as are naked
human made quibts in those giant refrigerator.
Speaker 2: That was their fatal flaw, right.
Speaker 1: So what changed Because there is a brand new paper
out in the Oxford academic journal Neuroscience of Consciousness.
Speaker 2: Yes, and what that twenty twenty five paper did was
synthesize all the new data we've been discussing today, the
molecular shielding, the continuous resonant driving, the dick superradiance of
the tryptofan lattices.
Speaker 1: They brought it all together, they did.
Speaker 2: The paper reviewed the experimental proof that microtubules do indeed
support sustained quantum states at room temperature.
Speaker 1: And what was their conclusion.
Speaker 2: The authors concluded that the foundational premise of orch or R,
the quantum microtubual substrate of consciousness, is no longer a
theoretical fringe idea. It is experimentally supported.
Speaker 1: That is massive.
Speaker 2: It changes neuroscience forever.
Speaker 1: So what does this all mean for us? The moment
you introduce quantum mechanics as the substrate of the brain.
You suddenly have the physical tools to solve the two
most notoriously intractable problems in neuroscience and philosophy.
Speaker 2: Right, the binding problem and the hard problem of consciousness.
Speaker 1: Let's look at the binding problem first. If I am
sitting in a cafe right now, and I'm looking at
a cup of coffee, my brain is processing the color
of the mug in the visual cortex at the back
of my head.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: The smell of the coffee is processed in the olfactory bulb.
The heat of the ceramic is processed in the somatosensory cortex.
Speaker 2: And those are geographically distinct regions of the brain exactly.
Speaker 1: They are physically separated, and they process information at slightly
different speeds. Yet I don't experience a fragmented, laggy sequence
of like a shape and then a color and then
a smell.
Speaker 2: No, you experience a single, unified, instantaneous moment of coffee.
Speaker 1: Right. And classical neuroscience really struggles to explain how these
disparate electrical signals bind together so flawlessly. But quantum mechanics
offers a direct physical mechanism for this, doesn't.
Speaker 2: It, It absolutely does. It offers entanglement.
Speaker 1: Entanglement.
Speaker 2: Yes, when the trip to fan networks within the microtubules
of those distant neurons inter a state of super radiance,
they can become quanmly entangled, and as.
Speaker 1: We know from physics, entangled particles behave as a single
unified system regardless of the physical distance between them.
Speaker 2: Exactly, a change in one part of the entangled state
is instantaneously reflected in the hole. Therefore, the binding problem
simply ceases to be a problem.
Speaker 1: Because it's all one connected system.
Speaker 2: Right. The unity of conscious experience is simply the macro
level manifestation of a massive brain wae it entangled quantum state.
The disparate sensory inputs are literally woven into a single
physical wave function.
Speaker 1: That is so elegant that that brings us to epiphenomenalism,
which is often called the hard problem.
Speaker 2: This is the really tricky one.
Speaker 1: Yeah, why does it feel like anything to be alive?
I mean, if we are just complex classical computers. A
laptop doesn't feel the warmth of a process or under
a heavy load, It just executes code.
Speaker 2: Right, There's no inner experience in a MacBook.
Speaker 1: So if I am just a biological laptop. Why do
I have a subjective inner world? Now? I want to
push back on the quantum explanation here on behalf of
our listeners, because I think a lot of people might
have the exact same hesitation.
Speaker 2: Well, please do. It's a big leap to make.
Speaker 1: If you tell me that my deepest feelings, my memories
of my childhood, my ability to appreciate a beautiful sunset,
If all that is literally just quantum wave functions collapsing
inside tiny prokin tubes, doesn't that just replace one version
of a biological robot with a smaller, more advanced quantum robot.
Speaker 2: That is the fear.
Speaker 1: Yes, I mean, if it's all just physics, where is
free will? Are you saying my entire sense of self
is just an illusion and we are incredibly advanced fleshtro.
Speaker 2: It is a vital philosophical challenge, But the distinction between
classical and quantum physics actually provides the beautiful answer to this.
Speaker 1: Okay, I'm listening.
Speaker 2: Classical physics is inherently deterministic. If you possess a supercomputer
powerful enough to know the exact starting position, the mass,
and the velocity of every single atom in a classical universe.
You can calculate the entire future of that universe with
perfect accuracy.
Speaker 1: It's a closed loop of cause and effect, like billiard
balls on a table.
Speaker 2: Exactly. So, if the human brain operates purely on classical physics,
then free will is indeed a mathematically approvable illusion. Every
choice you have ever made was predetermined by the chemical
state of your brain a millisecond prior.
Speaker 1: Which is a pretty bleak outlook honestly, very bleak.
Speaker 2: But quantum mechanics destroys determinism at the foundational quantum level.
Reality is probabilistic. An electron doesn't have a defined position
until it is measured. It exists as a wave of
potential outcomes.
Speaker 1: So by rooting consciousness in the quantum realm, Penrose and
hammer Off are actually rescuing the concept of free will
from the deterministic trap of classical chemistry.
Speaker 2: Precisely, in the Orchar model, the objective reduction, which is
the OAR part of the acronym, refers to the precise
moment the quantum superposition collapses into a definitive state. Okay,
and Penrose argues that this collapse is not just random,
nor is it strictly deterministic. He believes it is influenced
by the foundational geometry of space time itself. Wow. This
implies that your subjective awareness is not just some illusion
generated by a biological machine. It is a fundamental feature
of the universe. The inherent uncertainty and probabilistic nature of
the quantum realm provide the exact physical wiggle room required
for genuine agency.
Speaker 1: So your brain is basically a specialized quantum antenna structured
to interface with the deepest layers of reality, appsing infinite
possibilities into a single experienced reality.
Speaker 2: Exactly, it leaves room for the subjective, irreducible nature of awareness.
Your inner experience is tied to the deepest level of
physical reality, which.
Speaker 1: Means we are standing at the absolute boundary here between
hard physics, evolutionary biology, and the deepest philosophical questions of existence.
Speaker 2: We really are. It's an impartial philosophical crossroads.
Speaker 1: As collision forces us to confront a massive, unavoidable question.
We have established that the architecture for room temperature quantum
computing is exquisitely complex.
Speaker 2: Oh undeniably, it requires perfectly spaced nanimeter lattices, specific hydrophobic shielding,
resonant frequency tuning. It's an engineering nightmare, right.
Speaker 1: And biology solved this engineering nightmare billions of years before
humans existed. But how did biology solve it? Where did
the blueprint for this quantum architecture actually come from?
Speaker 2: So the source material we are analyzing today presents two distinct,
heavily debated frameworks for the origin of this biological quantum architecture.
Speaker 1: And it is crucial that we examine both of these
viewpoints with deep intellectual rigor and total impartiality, because this
discovery is forcing scientists and thinkers alike to revisit the
most foundational questions of origins.
Speaker 2: Exactly, So, the first perspective is anchored in the immense
optimizing power of deep time and undirected natural selection.
Speaker 1: Let's expand on that evolutionary framework. First four and a
half billion years is a stretch of time so vast
that the human brain cannot intuitively grasp it.
Speaker 2: Right, We just don't have the mental hardware to understand
of billion years.
Speaker 1: In this view, you don't really need a blueprint at all.
You just need random mutation and a brutal, unyielding filter
for survival.
Speaker 2: Exactly, this perspective relies on the concept of a fitness landscape.
So over billions of years, life has been subjected to
an astronomical number of genetic mutations across an entire planetary scale.
Organisms are essentially running a relentless parallel search algorithm for
serve vible efficiency in a resource scarce environment. Any mucation
that allows a cell to process information faster or utilize
energy more efficiently confers a massive survival advantage.
Speaker 1: So the argument here is that since the laws of
quantum mechanics are the fundamental laws of the universe, it
is a mathematical inevitability that blind, undirected evolution would eventually
stumble upon the most efficient physical processes available.
Speaker 2: Right, evolution didn't know it was building a quantum computer.
It didn't have a goal. It simply blindly refined the
geometry of proteins generation after generation until they inadvertently formed
charity cages that shielded quantum states.
Speaker 1: Because organisms with those proteins process stimuli faster and survive
to reproduce the sheer scale of deep time basically guarantees
the optimization of matter.
Speaker 2: Yes, so in this view, the majestic complexity of a
quantum shielding microtubule is simply the ultimate testament to the
relentless algorithmic power of blind natural selection.
Speaker 1: It is blind nature optimizing itself to the absolute physical
limits of the universe.
Speaker 2: Okay, so what is the counter perspective presented in the sources? Because,
as you mentioned, there are physicists and thinkers who look
at the exact same data and arrive at a radically
different conclusion. Right.
Speaker 1: The second perspective focuses heavily on the sheer mathematical improbability
and the extreme foundational requirements of top down quantum architecture.
Speaker 2: The irreducible complexity argument.
Speaker 1: Yes, this view argues that the necessary conditions for molecular
shielding and super radiance are just too complex to have
arisen from gradual random mutations.
Speaker 2: Because if a protein fold must be geometrically perfect to
shield equibit, a partially folded protein offers no quantum survival
advantage at all. Right, it just fails to hold the
quantum state exactly.
Speaker 1: It's either a functional Faraday cage or it isn't. Therefore,
the incremental steps of evolutions struggle to explain that sudden
leap to quantum coherence. So from this perspective. The fact
that ordinary biomolecules possess this hidden, mathematically pristine quantum geometry
implies an underlying embedded intelligence.
Speaker 2: Yes, the source material notes that some thinkers view this
architecture not as the result of blind physical laws, but
as the deliberate signature of a creator, a designer who
architected matter and embedded this immense computational capacity into the
fundamental fabric of reality from the very beginning.
Speaker 1: And it is our job today not to declare a
winner in that specific debate, but to emphasize how profoundly
important it is that we are even having it.
Speaker 2: Absolutely the data demands that we ask these questions.
Speaker 1: Whether you view the quantum computing architecture of your cells
as the breathtaking blind triumph of evolution over deep time
or the deliberate embedded design of a creator, the physical
reality inside your body remains exactly the same.
Speaker 2: It is a system that utterly defies our previous limits
of imagination.
Speaker 1: It really does, and it echoes the profound intuition of
Urban Schrodinger.
Speaker 2: Oh, yes, the nineteen forty four book.
Speaker 1: Right in nineteen forty four, before we even understood the
double helix structure, of DNA. Schrodinger wrote a book called
What Is Life? And he argued that classical thermodynamics and
chemistry were totally insufficient to explain the staggering order and
behavior of living things.
Speaker 2: He was so far ahead of his time.
Speaker 1: He boldly predicted that to truly understand biology, we would
have to discover new laws of physics operating within the
living cell.
Speaker 2: Schrodinger's intuition was unparalleled. He couldn't have known the specific
mechanics of trip to fan and super radiants, or microtubule
phase shielding, obviously, but he recognized that the stability of
life required a foundation deeper than classical mechanics.
Speaker 1: And eighty years later, the hard data has finally caught
up with his intuition.
Speaker 2: We're realizing that life is not merely a wet chemical machine.
It is an active, structural, computational quantum system.
Speaker 1: And this realization transitions us from philosophical debate to immediate
practical implications for the future. I mean, this is where
the theory hits the road.
Speaker 2: Right, The next five years are going to be wild.
Speaker 1: The boundary between quantum physics and biology isn't just blurring anymore.
It has completely dissolved. If we are moving from passively
observing nature to actively speaking its quantum language, how does
that rewrite medicine and technology in the near term.
Speaker 2: Well, the applications are going to be revolutionary. We are
discussed bag to the biological quantum sensor.
Speaker 1: Right right, the oat plant magnetometer.
Speaker 2: So expand that concept. We are looking at the development
of quantum biosensors that can be integrated directly into the
human body. These sensors could monitor the quantum coherence of
your cellular networks in real time.
Speaker 1: Wait, monitor the coherence? Why is that important?
Speaker 2: Because disease, whether it is an autoimmune disorder, Alzheimer's or cancer,
often begins as a breakdown in cellular communication and metabolic
efficiency at the most basic level.
Speaker 1: Oh, I see, So these sensors could detect the decoherence
of disease cells long before any physical or chemical symptoms
actually manifest.
Speaker 2: Exactly, we are talking about detecting illness at the absolute
foundational layer of physical reality before it even becomes a
chemical problem.
Speaker 1: That is incredible, and I imagine treating it at that
same layer. Two.
Speaker 2: Yes, if we map the quantum resonant frequencies of these proteins.
We're looking at the dawn of engineered quantum pharmacology quantum drugs. Basically, Yeah,
instead of designing drug molecules based merely on their physical
shape to block a chemical receptor, we could design pharmaceuticals
using quantum principles.
Speaker 1: How would that even work?
Speaker 2: We could create molecules that emit specific resonant frequencies to
re establish quantum coherence in failing cellular networks. This could
potentially lead to treatments that are exponentially more effective, acting
instantaneously with zero chemical side effects.
Speaker 1: Because you aren't flooding the body with harsh chemicals. You're
just retuning the quantum state of the cells.
Speaker 2: You're just fixing the phase alignment. Yeah. Furthermore, it fundamentally
rewrites the future of brain computer interfaces.
Speaker 1: Oh, this is huge. Like the neural laced technologies people
are working on.
Speaker 2: Right currently, technology is trying to link the human brain
to computers are relying on detecting macro level electrical impulses
the classical firing of neurons.
Speaker 1: Which, if Orchre is correct, is just the exhaust fumes
of the actual computation exactly.
Speaker 2: It is like trying to understand a complex symphony by
measuring the vibrations of the concert hall walls. But if
consciousness and neural processing are actually happening at the quantum
level inside the microtubules.
Speaker 1: Then future interfaces won't measure electricity at all.
Speaker 2: No, there will be designed to entangle directly with the
biological quibots in your brain. We are stepping into an
era where we can interface seamlessly with the structural source
code of the mind.
Speaker 1: That is both incredibly exciting and slightly terrifying.
Speaker 2: It definitely raises a lot of ethical questions, but the
technological capability is on the horizon.
Speaker 1: Well. We have covered an immense expanse of territory today.
Speaker 2: We really have from absolute zero to the human brain.
Speaker 1: We started by looking at the frozen brute force engineering
of human quantum computers, and then we journey down into
the microscopic architecture of the biological cell, revealing how protein
folding creates these dynamic resonant shields to protect delicate quantum
states from thermal chaos. We explored how the geometric arrangement
of tryptofan molecules creates super radiant networks processing information at
trillions of operations per second.
Speaker 2: Pushing life to the absolute margulous levit and speed limit
of the universe.
Speaker 1: We explored the cosmological scale of this computation over Earth's history,
and we delved into the profound possibility that this exact
quantum architecture is the literal physical root of your conscious mind.
Rescuing human agency from classical determinism is.
Speaker 2: The ultimate realization that the biological organism is the most robust, sophisticated,
and cosmically significant quantum computing system we have ever.
Speaker 1: Discovered, and it has been operating perfectly inside of you
since the moment you were born, which brings us to
a final thought, an implication we haven't even touched on yet.
If your brain is a quantum computer running on the
entanglement of trillions of super radiant molecules, and the oak
tree outside your window is also running massive quantum computations
in its cellular structure, what happens when we zoom out?
We know that quantum entanglement doesn't respect physical boundaries. If
biological systems are fundamentally quantum systems, is it possible that
entanglement exists between organisms?
Speaker 2: Oh, macro entanglement That is a wild thought.
Speaker 1: Could the flocking of birds, the synchronized massive mycelial networks
beneath the forest floor, or even the intuitive connections between
human beings be macro level expressions of biological quantum entanglement.
Are we just isolated quantum computers or is the entire
biosphere functioning as one heavily entangled planetary scale quantum network.
Speaker 2: That changes everything about how we view ecology.
Speaker 1: It does, and that is the question we want to
leave you with today. If life on Earth is a continuous,
interconnected quantum wave function, how does that change your understanding
of your relationship to the natural world and the people
around you. Does it change what it means to be
an individual for you?
Speaker 2: It's definitely something to ponder.
Speaker 1: We want to know where you stand on this. Dive
into the implications and leave a comment below with your thoughts.
Thank you so much for joining us on thrilling Threads.
Remember to keep questioning, stay intensely curious, and the next
time you look at a simple plant, or simply look
down at your own hands, remember the staggering truth you
are looking at the most advanced universe spanning technology ever discovered.
We'll see you next time.