Research, Science, Quantum Physics, Human Design

Quantum Physics for Dummies (and Weirdos) - Part 2

Quick note: Without further ado, please read Part Two!

If you missed Part 1, you can find it here.

Quick recap of where we left off: the mid-1970s, as the New Age movement started taking off.... when we began to blue the conceptual parallels between quantum mechanics and Eastern philosophies. This undercurrent nearly made a mockery of the science itself, while mysticism spouted “proof” of our collective consciousness and the potential for enlightenment.

What IS interesting, however, is found in the 50-year long hindsight … The woo-woo wacka-doos may not have been wrong!

The farcical nature of the claims, it seems, merely intrigued a new slew of hypotheses to directly disprove the mystical claims and bring the study of quantum mechanics back into the realm of real science. The concept of quantum biology emerged, attempting to study quantum effects in biological systems such as photosynthesis and various brain studies of neurons. From this, two theories were born. The first, the theory of quantum decoherence, which holds that warm, wet environments destroy quantum states almost instantly - becoming the central objection to any quantum theory occurring in the brain. However, the second theory is the theory of Orchestrated Objective Reduction, or Orch OR theory, which attempted to claim that the human brain is like a quantum computer, due to its sheer complexity and capability. Therefore, consciousness itself must originate at the quantum level within the brain’s neurons - more specifically, within the microtubules, a hollow structure that maintains the cell shape of eukaryotic cells. (For completeness’s sake, eukaryotic cells have a membrane around the nucleus and other organelles within the cell itself and are common in many plants, fungi, and animals, including both unicellular and multicellular biological creatures.)

Meanwhile, Eastern philosophies began to become more mainstream and secularized for the Westerners, giving rise to meditation practices and yoga.

Quantum Physicists, on their quest for deeper knowledge, came to know meditation as a practice for focusing their mental energies. In fact, this was not a practice limited to Physicists but also Data Scientists, Molecular Biologists, and Mathematicians alike. The rationale for their tapping into what would later become broader, multi-faceted theories about how the Universe functions and how we, as humans, are inter-related more deeply than we initially knew, was nothing more than a desire to leverage meditation to better utilize their brains and focus better.

In 1999, Lisa Randall and Raman Sundrum attempted to describe how the world is nothing more than a higher-dimensional universe. Nova Spivack writes on geometric consciousness models. Michio Kaku, in his book The God Equation, proposes dimensional string theory has vibrations, similar to sound waves, light waves, and the pulse of biorhythms, seeking an equation that could “read the mind of God” - but stopped short at the idea of higher-dimensional consciousness. Most recently, Maria Strømme, a nanotechnology professor, published a model proposing that consciousness exists as a fundamental field and individual consciousnesses are expressions of this field. While pressures from critics forced a retraction only a few months ago, the same journal published another article, this time by Masashi Awata that builds upon Strømme’s work mere weeks before the retraction. While Strømme’s work gained a lot of attention when Popular Mechanics published an article highlighting the study just prior to retraction, Awata’s work is quietly flying under the radar. For now.

All of these scientists have made discoveries that contribute to a growing body of knowledge, interest, and backlash on Collective Consciousness, giving credence to Carl Jung’s psychological studies from 100+ years ago. Even figures such as Deepak Chopra threw their hats into this ring of research, tying modern Eastern philosophy to the scientific studies on Consciousness in the Universe. What is the most compelling of all is this: the debate over whether Consciousness is a true neuroscience or whether it is a pseudoscience held up by psychologists, philosophers and the woo-woo wacka-doos alike is a hot, bubbling cauldron of arguments on both sides of the spectrum. Case in point: one particular theory, the Integrated Information Theory, nearly 20 years old, had 124 scholars write an open letter in 2023 to protest it! But all of these theories have remained precisely that - theories - due to the inability to observe the reality of a quantum state within a biological being… until now?

The most compelling case comes from Michael Wiest at Wellesley College's Neuroscience Department, whose own lab put rats under anesthesia and found the switch for consciousness sitting in the microtubules — exactly where Orch OR said to look. He then gathered that alongside the other recent work, including direct physical evidence of quantum entanglement inside a warm, wet, living brain, and built them into a single argument.

And then he pushed further. The usual dismissal of quantum consciousness is that it just sets two mysteries equal and calls them both solved: consciousness is weird, quantum physics is weird, therefore same. Wiest's answer is that quantum physics is weird in the one exact way consciousness needs it to be. It has the property classical physics cannot produce: irreducible unity.

In other words, right now humans are having one experience on Earth, in this physical manifestation of a human body. Eighty-six billion neurons are firing in our heads AND we are only getting exactly one experience out of them. This is not possible in classical physics, as everything classical comes apart into pieces. An entangled state is the only physical thing that we know of that stays whole — the math alone prohibits describing it as a set of parts. Wiest’s argument is that consciousness has real causal power. Awareness does work in the world; it isn't decoration sitting on top of human machinery. The raw material of consciousness is built into matter at the foundation, and that individual awareness is those pieces combining.

Which is, more or less, what every mystical tradition on this list has been saying for three thousand years. Taking this in light of the other studies, the logical leap between ancient philosophies and quantum biology is narrowing with probabilistic speed.

Spinning these scientific theories back into spirituality, every major religion on the planet has versions of ascension legends, beliefs in higher beings, and divine messengers sent from the beyond. Some people call this God, or The Universe, The Divine, or, merely, Source. Prophets, shamans, mystics, monks, and even saviors can all be bundled into one, collective concept: they simply comprise those who speak of the pathway to enlightenment, of higher consciousness.

But WHAT, pray tell, does this all have to do with Human Design??

Everything.

When the human is the mechanism, the predetermined properties of ideas then become the limiter of the infinite possibilities in creative consciousness. The potentials held by our perceptions alter our experiences of reality, and the infinite potentiality of that reality. Therefore, the mere ability to imagine what is POSSIBLE truly is the conscious culmination of perceptions that are expansive.

The science of creativity, a premise of Human Design, is the science of our conscious reality - what we Create, Becomes.

And if the human brain, as well as the nervous system and the interstitial fluid of the body (topics from the prior post The Shape of Energy) all play a role in how quantum entanglement could exist, then it no longer seems outlandish to believe that the energy in our bodies can be mapped to personality traits, that the nervous system is merely an energetic blueprint that describes how we feel emotions and ideas and intuition in multiple organs, with energy stimulated by hormone production, essential proteins and minerals, and oxygen in our blood. That we describe our souls within our bodies as being our “inner compass” of our truth, our resiliency, our coherence as individuals, as members of a community, as a human collective sharing a consciousness experience.

A consciousness experience, if I may be so bold, best explained with Archetypes.

(Why Human Design Series, Post 4 of 6: Next Up! You are SO Archetypal)