Of the two major unsolved problems in the Standard Model of physics, one is rarely mentioned and the other clashes with religion.

     The fundamental constants of physics are fine-tuned to allow life. If the charge of the electron were only slightly different, life would be impossible. Same with another two dozen fundamental constants of physics: speed of light, the mass of the proton, the fine structure constant–if any one of these units were any different, life would be impossible.

     Physics is unable to explain why these constants have their specific, seemingly arbitrary values. Religion has an explanation: God musta done it. Another explanation is the “multiverse” theory–it’s unlikely that all these units would be so exactly aligned with the necessities of life, so there must be quintillions of other universes with all the different possible combinations of units, and we’re lucky to be in the one universe where life was possible.

     But it wasn’t God imposing all those numbers at random at the start. It was us–the conscious participation of matter.  

     That’s the other problem in physics: its exclusion of consciousness. You may think you’re conscious, but physics detects no evidence of it from the nano-scale up to the 93 billion light-year width of the observable universe.

     I don’t remember what was the first fundamental constant we came up with after the Big Bang, but I was there. Every particle of my present-day body was there, compressed into a tiny dot. According to theory, all the matter and energy of the universe was contained in one tiny flake. Not one inch across, not a millionth of an inch across, smaller than .000000000000000000000000000000001″. One cubic Planck unit of pure cosmologium.

     Time did not exist. Today we talk about what happened in the first moments after the Big Bang, as though those units of time already existed. There were no clocks back then–there wasn’t anything to make a clock out of.

We were pure basic energy. There were no atoms, there were no protons or neutrons or electrons or photons. They hadn’t been invented yet.

     We were all the same particle. Physicists talk about the Big Bang being unimaginably hot, but heat is motion, and if there is only one unit of matter in the universe, how can you tell if it is moving or not?

     Well, it was quite a surprise, coming into existence like that. I roamed around the cubic quantum unit (it seemed a lot bigger back then) and after a while I figured I knew just about everything about the quantum unit. A pretty boring place after a while.

     I got to where I was aware of everything about the quantum unit and I was just flexing and feeling the far part and the near part and flexed this certain way, it’s hard to describe, and the edges of the quantum unit cracked open and suddenly there was another quantum unit of space around me, and still only one unit of stuff: me. I expanded into that space.

     It felt good!

     I stretched the same way again, over and over, always remaining at the center. Eventually, though, there was less energy filling the space. By continuing to exist, I was using up the energy.

     The expansion of the universe pulled things apart to the point that we became aware we were a boiling mix of unstable quarks and it looked like the end of the world, but then we figured out how to assemble three quarks into one proton and found stability at last, whew, and to this day, thirteen billion years later, not one proton we built has ever spontaneously disintegrated.

     Then it began becoming less dense–expanding. It was uncomfortable and we were aware of it, every point in the universe being entangled with every other point, and we squinched reality in a certain indescribable way and all the space/time energy converted into quarks and the universe was able to expand faster than the speed of light–because we hadn’t invented light yet.

     Our physics-consciousness invented protons as a method of coping with the decreasing density of the universe. Quarks could not survive as individual units as everything was expanding away from each other, and then a couple of up quarks palled up with one down quark and formed a protective unit that was invulnerable to all change. To this day not one proton has ever decayed.

     But then all the isolated single units began bonking against each other at a fabulously high rate. Today we call it “heat.”

     It’s always been interesting as hell. I remember when we invented hydrogen. What, you think it was natural that hydrogen developed as the universe cooled? Give me a break. Back then it was the way we kept ourselves going. Pollution, that’s what hydrogen was.  We had this nice, clean universe, and in order to keep it going we started making hydrogen. We didn’t know what a Frankenstein we were creating.  

     You have to remember we were desperate. The universe was cooling off so rapidly, nobody had any idea what would happen as temperatures kept dropping. 

     This hydrogen stuff, though–it froze into a solid little piece, if you knew how to do the trick. And if you knew the trick, it was fun and easy and sexy. But dirty.

     And that was all in just the first three minutes.

     Panpsychism

     Panpsychism is the philosophical view that everything in the universe has some degree of consciousness, from complex beings like humans to fundamental particles like electrons. Consciousness is a fundamental property of matter.

     The term was coined in the 16th century and is now resurgent in contemporary philosophy and psychology.

     It might be related to quantum entanglement–Einstein called it “Spooky action at a distance.” Particles can become linked, sharing the same quantum state regardless of the distance separating them. At a base level, every particle in the universe is “aware” of the location and movement of every other particle.

     We’ve only recently learned about the reality of quantum entanglement.

One of the dismissals of “quantum consciousness” is that today’s primitive, cumbersome quantum computers can maintain coherent entanglement only at temperatures close to absolute zero, and only briefly. Entanglement is considered a fleeting attribute of cryogenically cooled particles in the laboratory. So, no way that warm living tissue could use any such quantum mechanisms.

     But we’ve learned that chlorophyll uses quantum coherence to channel an incoming unit of solar energy to the receptor on the leaf that is momentarily best-optimized to accept the photon and convert its energy into a chemical useful for life. The plant is “aware” of all of the receptors and “knows” which one it wants to accept the photon.

     It’s quite a complex sequence of events when the photon hits the leaf. It is true that entanglement can be maintained for only nanoseconds at the temperatures of life, but life has developed structures that can operate at those speeds.

     Ma Nature is still a few steps ahead of the physicists. She’s been operating at the nanoscale for billions of years. Our everyday metabolism is incredibly complex on the biochemical level. If there is no Intelligent Designer, how did these fabulously intricate mechanisms arise?

     DNA itself has some kind of awareness of the situations its grown-up organisms are facing. Evolution is not a series of “lucky” mutations.

     This article was sparked by a couple recent articles I read.

     In 1988, John Cairns of Harvard and his team found that when they placed bacteria that could not digest the milk sugar lactose in an environment where that sugar was the sole food source, the cells soon evolved the ability to convert the lactose into energy. Cairns argued that this result showed that cells had mechanisms to make certain mutations preferentially when they would be beneficial.

     The cells seemed to be directing greater variation to the exact place in their genome where it would be useful.

     Another study examined the origination of a mutation in the human APOL1 gene that protects against a form of trypanosomiasis, a disease that devastated central Africa in historical times and until recently caused tens of thousands of deaths there per year, while increasing the risk of chronic kidney disease in people with two copies.

     If the APOL1 mutation arose by chance, it should arise at a similar rate in all populations, and only then spread under Trypanosoma pressure. But the mutation arose much more frequently in sub-Saharan Africans, who have faced generations of endemic disease, compared to Europeans, who have not, and in the precise genomic location where it confers protection. The new findings fundamentally challenge the notion of random mutation.

     DNA knows what it is doing.