Plato was wrong in believing there is a realm for ideas and forms

be stored at, the aether has no means for storing information, the
aether only determines all the ratios... the constants... the law.
Nothing magic about phi or pi, they are just ratios... real but
non-material (not in spacetime) quantities... the tools of

the gears of physical reality.

Quantization and organization of space (CMBR) is determined by the
exclusive dimensions (information) of a myriad of matter fields
(pilot-waves) which originate from *already* existing matter, dead
or alive. [Which means that there is no information being

into spacetime from Plato's ideas realm, the information comes

reality at the spacetime level.]

The fabric of spacetime, the aether, consists of basic changeless
motionless fixed values (laws) from which everything else,

meaningful information, is being created *in spacetime*.

Human consciousness is spacetime dependent, just like matter. No
brain, no mind. Thus human consciousness appears with the

of matter, not before. First there had to be matter before there
could be any brains, and matter is spacetime dependent. Brains
emerged from the evolution of information that existed *in
spacetime*, there can't be evolution outside of spacetime.

The collective consciousness which Carl Jung speaks about is a
different thing, more akin to Einstein's gravitational aether and
what Buddhists believe.


Information is always material.

As the first fields appeared, information also appeared. Physical
reality is the product of these field interactions, therefore the
product of active information.

All information is transferred through waves. It could be sound
waves, light waves (colors) or a ground vibration, but it has to

in waves. Waves have nearly infinite capacity for information
storage. Thanks to EM waves, information can be quantized and made
into particles or wave packets (photons) and transferred,

through vast distances at the speed of light.

Inherent to wave mechanics are the mechanisms of wave

and parallel and non-linear information processing, and this
mechanisms, which are also affected and regulated by the laws of
thermodynamics, are responsible for information growth and the
evolution of biological matter. Information begets information.

Have you heard about morphogenetic fields? It is a field theory in
which all matter, including living matter, is shaped by fields
(waves). And it stands in solid grounds, scientifically speaking,

it is compatible with de Broglie/Bohm's matter-waves concepts. It

like saying that all matter is organized by fields in a similar

a VCR would record a TV program into a magnetic tape. As the tape
rolls inside the machine, electromagnetic information containing
signals (waves) re-arrange and organize the tape's magnetic
particles, which can later be used to reproduce well ordered

Morphogenetic fields re-arrange and order, what are otherwise

particles in a chaotic and disordered state, into organized

Using a Leaf Wing butterfly to explain God's intervention in the
creation of its camouflage is a mistake I used to make. Now I
understand that creating a camouflaged appearance to survive is

another function integrated into their state wave function, an
algorithm, a program in charge of acquiring information about the
environment in order to copy the shape of surrounding leaves. This
information is gathered by the insect's matter waves, as well as

is supplied by all the matter waves and EMR flowing from the
environment, as they are superimposed and integrated into the
insects own wave function.

Even though I see physical reality as a completely mechanistic
process, where there is no room for mysticism, I believe in
reality's indeterministic nature. Because of the oscillating

of quanta (elementary particles), there will always be a measure

freedom.

After billions of years, this information exchange between matter
and the environment in which it evolves has produced ever more
complex (information engenders information) self-organized

like human beings, for example, who have evolved to take full
advantage of these holistic awareness function of Nature, which is
what enables them to think. So thought is the same holistic
awareness function with which matter started organizing itself
billions of years ago.

Our consciousness (as it manifests in our human existence) is an
extension of the same holistic awareness function that
self-organized matter always utilized to observe itself, therefore
human consciousness is still - Nature observing itself.

As Roger Penrose explained quasicrystal development in his book

Emperor's New Mind" (p. 564), he writes that it appears as if the
whole crystal is 'observing' itself (each present atom

pattern is embedded into its pilot-wave) and choosing from qualia,
using some holistic awareness mechanism by which they can compare
present qualia to past qualia and all the possible rock-like
outcomes, all at once, and which are limited by the system's
tendencies or potentialities, until the right atom configurations
are found while constructing their "randomly forbidden, very
complex, icosahedral symmetries".

Experience plays an important role in the correct development of

crystals (as well as in all self-organized systems). The crystals
accomplish their self-observation by following information

in their pilot-wave (Bohm-de Broglie), which contains past (and

future) information about the crystal, as a whole. Proto-qualia

a quasicrystal would be how all the possible atom configurations
would 'feel like' as they remain in superposition until a good one
is selected, and only then could the collapse of the wave packet
finally occur.

From the moment the first self-organizing systems appeared in

to the moment the first human brain appeared it's being a few
billion years, but in both occasions the objective has been the
same; to experience existence. Penrose's quasicrystals don't have

brain, but they follow their state wave function as the measure by
which they must exist, and if by any reason they were to stop
following their state wave function as they add new atoms to their
body, they would end up becoming a totally different type of
material. The objective state a human being follows (or should I
say - the measure by which a human being exists) is defined by its
brain state wave function.

Is this proof, however, that there exists in Nature some syntropic
force, an energy analogous to information which will try at any
opportunity to beat entropy, constantly creating order out of

Evolution is a very slow ratchet-like motion, where nature selects
and locks-in any advantageous randomly occurring changes. These

property based selections where the favored properties are usually
the ones which will lead to increased thermal efficiency, and that
is going against entropy already.

The universe exists because of active information contained in all
kinds of interacting waves, and if it wasn't for wave

there would be no Universe. Thanks to the parallel and non-linear
information processing mechanisms inherent to waves there can be
information growth.

EMR was and still is the main means of information propagation and
natural communication between spacially separated objects, and
within objects. Already existing information leads to the creation
of more information. Information can only exist in a material

Biological organisms evolved to use light to their benefit very
slowly. As we already know, it took them billions of years
(pre-Cambrian to Cambrian) just to develop eyesight.

Brains are these little bio-mechanical tools that emerged with
evolution for the only purpose of enabling us to interpret and
interface with reality. Since what happens is really governed by

laws of thermodynamics, as spacetime tends towards equilibrium,
through a process of natural selection, matter improved its

to observe and perceive the environment and evolved into brains

could take advantage of the properties of spacetime. Brains exists
only because there is spacetime.

Nature would still be able to exist and observe itself even

the human observer, it would just be a more primitive process. Our
brains are Nature's best developed self-observational tool.

--
Laurent



****************************************


This is from Stuart Hameroff's website:

" Another candidate for the Cambrian emergence of Orch OR
consciousness involves the evolution of visual photoreceptors.
Amoeba respond to light by diffuse sol-gel alteration of their

cytoskeleton (Cronly-Dillon and Gregory, 1991). Euglena and other
single cell organisms have localized "eye spots" e.g. regions at

root of the microtubule-based flagellum. Cytoplasm may focus
incident light toward the eye spots and pigment material shields
certain angles to provide directional light detection (e.g.

this volume). Euglena swim either toward or away from light by
flagellar motion. Having no neurons or synapses, the single cell
euglena's photic response (sensory, perceptive and motor

depend on MT-cytoskeletal structures.

Mammalian cells including our own can respond to light.
Albrecht-Buehler (e.g. 1994) showed that single fibroblast cells
move toward red/infra-red light by utilizing their MT-based
centrioles for directional detection and guidance ("cellular
vision"); he also points out that centrioles are ideally designed
photodetectors. "

" Jibu et al (1994; 1996) have predicted that cellular vision
depends on a quantum state of ordered water in MT (microtubules)
inner cores.

They postulate a nonlinear quantum optical effect termed
"superradiance" conveying evanescent photons by a process of
"self-induced transparency" (the optical analogue of
superconductivity).

Hagan (1995) has observed that cellular vision provided an
evolutionary advantage for single cell organisms with cilia,
centrioles or flagella capable of quantum coherence.

In simple multicellular organisms, eyes and visual systems began
with groups of differentiated light-sensitive ciliated cells which
formed primitive "eye cups" (up to 100 photoreceptor cells) in

phyla including flatworms, annelid worms, molluscs, crustacea,
echinoderms and chordates (our original evolutionary branch
Cronly-Dillon and Gregory, 1991). The retinas in our eyes today
include over 108 rod and cone photoreceptors each comprised of an
inner and outer segment connected by a ciliated stalk. As each
cilium is comprised of about 300,000 tubulins, our retinas contain
about 3 x 1013 tubulins per eye. (Retinal rods, cones and glia are
interconnected by gap junctions - Leibovic, 1990.) Conventional
vision science assumes the cilium is purely structural, but the
centriole/cilium/flagella MT structure which Albrecht-Buehler has
analyzed as an ideal directional photoreceptor may detect or guide
photons in eye spots of single cells, primitive eye cups in early
multicellular organisms, and rods and cones in our retinas.

coherence leading to consciousness could have emerged in sheets of
gap junction-connected ciliated cells in eye cups of early

worms. "



~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~



Excerpt from: "Physics and Life" by Paul Davies

in: The First Steps of Life in the Universe

Proceedings of the Sixth Trieste Conference on Chemical Evolution.

[...]

Can molecular Darwinism explain biogenesis? Maybe, but we have

idea what those first replicating molecules might be. Examination

real organic replicator systems like RNA/proteins indicates that
even the simplest replicators are extremely large and complex
molecules, unlikely to form by chance. Moreover, the smaller the
molecules the sloppier they copy, suggesting that molecules small
enough to form by chance would be very bad at replicating
information, and thus subject to Eigen's error catastrophe (Eigen

Schuster, 1979), whereby information is eroded by the inaccurate
copying process faster than natural selection can inject it.

I concede that if something like the RNA world (Cech, 1986) were
given to us ready-made, it has the capacity to evolve into life as
we know it. But it strains credulity to suppose that the RNA world
sprang into being in one huge chemical transformation. Likely it
would be the product of a long series of steps. We can liken the
situation to a vast decision tree of chemical reactions, with the
RNA world as one tiny twig on the tree. (There is the question of
whether there are other twigs that could lead to life, but I shall
assume here that the RNA route is the only one.) So we need to
understand how a hypothetical class of simple, small replicators
navigated through that decision tree and 'found' the RNA twig. Was
this just a lucky fluke, or is there something other than a random
walk involved?

Now searching databases and navigating decision trees is an
interesting branch of science that we might term informational
physics. I wish to conjecture that some new discoveries in this
field just might help explain how life's decision tree was
navigated.

The first point I want to make is that informational physics
encompasses mechanisms capable of converting random motion into
directed motion. An example of current interest is the so-called
Brownian ratchet, based on a device first studied in detail by
Smoluchowski (1912). It consists of a ratchet and pawl connected

a rod to a set of vanes, and immersed in a gas in thermodynamic
equilibrium. The ratchet allows the vanes to rotate in one
direction, but not the reverse. The random motion of the molecules
bombarding the vanes will cause the system to rotate, thereby
apparently converting undirected chaotic molecular motion into
directed macroscopic motion. This seems to violate the second law

thermodynamics, because the rotation could be used to perform

e.g. by lifting a weight. The resolution of the paradox was
essentially spotted by Smoluchowski (1912) and refined by Feynman
(Feynman, Leighton & Sands, 1963) and Abbott (Abbott, Davis &
Parrondo, 1999), in which it was pointed out that in
thermodynamicequilibrium the position of the pawl will fluctuate

to thermal noise, and allow the ratchet to slip backwards as often
as it is driven forwards. There is then no net rotation on

Moreover, a type of Brownian ratchet that serves to convert random
into directed motion has been devised by Magnasco (1993), and
studied by Doering (1995) and Harmer & Abbott (1999). In this
system, an ensemble of randomly bouncing balls can be made to
diffuse uphill if driven by a tilted sawtooth forcing potential

flashes on and off - the so-called flashing ratchet (Ajari & Prost
1993). The ratchet thus drives the system 'the wrong way' from a
thermodynamic viewpoint (though there is no violation of the

law because the system is not closed on account of the external
potential). The relevance of this discussion to life is that
Darwinian evolution is an example of a ratchet, because

random changes are locked in, thus also giving a superficial
appearance of going against the second law of thermodynamics.

Derived from the physical example of the Brownian ratchet is the
curious paradox of Parrondo (Harmer & Abbott, 1999; Parrondo et.
al., 2000), involving games of chance. Parrondo has proved that

fair games that individually have an expectation of loss to the
player can be played in combination with an expectation of gain!
Again, the relevance of this to biological evolution is clear:
Darwinism is a type of game of chance in which the winners,

against the thermodynamic gradient ('climbing Mount Improbable',

use Richard Dawkins' evocative description (Dawkins, 1996)) are

survivors. If chance variations could lead to ordered evolution as
opposed to random diffusion, then canalization within the chemical
decision tree may result. (Of course, if nature obligingly directs
the activity preferentially towards the RNA world we are back to
teleology again.)

My remaining examples concern the possibility that quantum

may have a more direct role to play in life than merely providing
the mechanism of chemical bonding. The founders of quantum

generally believed that life required some extraordinary physics

explain it. Thus Schrödinger wrote (Schrödinger, 1944, p. 81), 'We
must be prepared to find a new kind of physical law prevailing.'
Several researchers have suggested that quantum mechanics might be
biologically relevant. An early conjecture along these lines is
Fröhlich's theory (Fröhlich, 1983) that collective vibrational

(coherent phonons) in biological membranes can create conditions
similar to a Bose-Einstein condensate, leading to ordered,
cooperative behaviour in which the vibrational energy is
concentrated into the lowest mode.

A more recent example has been given by McFadden (2000), who

out that certain mutations occur as a result of quantum tunneling
events in the pair bonds within DNA. He conjectures that the
biological environment might 'select' certain mutations by

the tunneling probabilities. Is this credible? Certainly the

of quantum transitions involving strong coupling to the

involves some unusual features. For example, in the watchdog or
quantum Zeno effect (Itano et. al., 1990), continuous
measurement-like interaction with by the environment can serve to
paralyze a quantum system in its initial state. The inverse

or Zeno effect (Altenmuller & Schenzle, 1993; Kofman & Kurizki,
2000) can amplify certain transitions and 'steer' a quantum system
through a sequence of states by environmental interactions.

conjectures that competing quantum transitions with biochemically
very distinct consequences might have very different transition
rates, so that adaptive mutations might be quantum mechanically
favoured. Applying this to biogenesis, it is possible to imagine
that states that are in some sense 'more lifelike' (e.g. more
complex, more organized, more information rich) might also be
favoured. The trouble is, it's very hard to pin down a precise
attribute for 'lifelike' that can exercise a well-defined physical
effect. The most obvious candidate is replication, which has a

physical basis. In a quantum system with feedback, it may be that
the production of a replicator in a complicated network of

reactions acts like an attractor, with the feedback amplifying,

something like the inverse watchdog effect, the transition
probabilities leading to replicating molecules.

These ideas hint that maybe quantum mechanics can 'fast-track' a
chemical soup to complex biologically-relevant states. Since the
object of the exercise is to explain the origin of biological
information, the appropriate theoretical framework would seem to

quantum information theory. This subject is currently of intense
interest because of the possibility of constructing a quantum
computer (Milburn, 1998; Bennett & DiVincenzo, 2000). The key
property of quantum information processing is that it is far more
powerful than classical information processing. That is because

wavefunction of a collection of entangled particles can store
information in the phases. So long as quantum coherence is
maintained, transformations of the wavefunction can simultaneously
process exponentially more information than the corresponding
classical system. Farhi and Gutmann (1998) have applied quantum
information theory to decision trees, and found an exponential
improvement in the search time. Treating the biogenesis problem as
the need to navigate the molecular decision tree to 'find' the RNA
world, or something similar, then a quantum search would obviously
be vastly quicker.

Building upon these ideas, a fruitful line of investigation would

to apply quantum information theory to ratchets. Quantum ratchets
might combine quantum search efficiency with the directionality
property of ratchets. Another related field under active
investigation is quantum game theory (Meyer, 1999; Eisert et. al.,
1999). This is closely related to the molecular evolution decision
tree problem: if competing chemical reactions are regarded as
participants in a game, with the 'winner' being life (or simply a
replicator), then quantum strategies are expected to be much more
efficient than their classical counterparts.

Hameroff (1998), and more recently Nanopoulos (Mershin et. al.,
2000), have suggested that quantum information processing may play
an important role in protein folding - another famous decision

problem, where this time the branches of the tree are alternative
conformational states. These researchers point out that the

tubulin can undergo quantum flips between two specific
conformational states, and thus form a binary quantum switch - the
basic component of a quantum computer. In a microtubule of the

found within living cells, ordered arrays of tubulin molecules
constitute a sort of quantum cellular automaton, potentially

of prodigious information processing. Penrose and Hameroff

1994) have also suggested that quantum information processing

place in microtubules, and, more controversially, that this

may be involved in the phenomenon of consciousness.

There is some circumstantial evidence in favour of the theory that
quantum computation plays a crucial role in life. Grover's

was devised to apply quantum information processing to search an
unsorted database of N objects by posing Q yes-no questions.

(1999) proved that this would produce a N1/2 improvement in the
search time. The relationship between N and Q in Grover's

is:

(2Q + 1) sin-1(N-1/2) = p/2

which has the intriguing solutions Q = 1, N = 4, and Q = 3, N =
20.2. Patel (2000) has suggested that these numbers could explain
the genetic code. N = 4 corresponds to the four nucleotide bases,

= 3 to the triplet code and N @ 20 to the twenty amino acids life
uses. He has developed a scenario of molecular assembly using
quantum interrogation in which these numbers may crop up

as a consequence of quantum mechanics.

Another hint of quantum physics at work in the genetic code is the
discovery that the coding assignments possess a compact

in terms of supersymmetry (Bashford et. al., 1999). Supersymmetry
arises in particle physics as a unified description of fermions

bosons, and is a subject to which Salam made important
contributions. To find supersymmtery appearing in a biological
context is remarkable, and still somewhat mysterious. Unless it is

weird coincidence, it points to a deep link between the quantum
realm of particle physics and the quasi-classical realm of protein
assembly.

[...]

Plato was wrong in believing there is a realm for ideas and forms to
be stored at.

Quantization and organization of space (CMBR) is determined by the
exclusive dimensions (information) of a myriad of matter fields
(pilot-waves) which originate from *already* existing matter, dead
or alive. [Which means that there is no information being projected
into spacetime from Plato's ideas realm, the information comes from
reality at the spacetime level.]