The profession of biology is deeply conflicted about purpose. It seeks to explain life as a physical and mechanical phenomenon. To reduce the organism to the parts that compose it.

Yet life is intrinsically intentional. Our standard models of physics and chemistry leave no space for this most fundamental attribute of life. 

This has brought biology to an impasse. We cannot solve this without Quantum Mechanics.

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In 2021, I published a scientific paper about how all information-based systems work. I observed that in ALL such systems, cognition (thinking and understanding) creates code, which controls chemical reactions.

This means the ability to think and understand comes first, which then leads to the creation of instructions that dictate how chemical reactions happen.

This runs counter to the textbook explanation of cause and effect in biology. The textbooks say chemical reactions produce code, which then gives rise to cognition. However, there are no examples in the scientific literature that show either step happening.

The evidence for each is zero.

To support my observation, I used a mathematical proof based on Alan Turing’s halting problem. Turing cracked the German code in WWII. He also invented the concept of a modern computer in 1936. My proof shows that cognition generates code, and not the other way around.

The role of the genetic code in controlling chemical reactions also supports this idea.

So… the Big Question in biology is: What is the nature and source of cognition?

In my new 2023 paper, “The role of quantum mechanics in cognition-based evolution,” I propose a connection between biology and Quantum Mechanics (QM).

Quantum Mechanics is famous for the “double slit experiment” now 200 years old. It shows that cause and effect do not conform to our classical intuitions. Here’s how the experiment works:

A coherent light source pointed at a screen and blocked by two slits will produce an interference wave pattern on the screen. This holds true even if the photons are fired at the screen one at a time.

However, if you put a particle detector on one slit to see which slit the particle passed through, it ceases to produce a wave pattern. It makes a dot on the screen instead.

Then if you unplug the particle detector, the system produces a wave pattern again.

It is as though the particle “knows” whether the experimenter is looking for a particle or a wave. It even “knows” whether the detector is working or not.

In this paper, I suggest that the same principle that allows an observer in QM to collapse a wave function is also responsible for giving biology its ability to act on the world, rather than just passively receiving information.

Just like all living cells are capable of cognitive processes, I propose that humans are quantum observers because we are made up of cells, and all cells are observers.

This supports the idea that in QM, the observer doesn’t just record events, but actually influences their outcomes.

THE attributes that make biology special – and enable life to create order out of disorder, instead of the other way around – are volition, freedom, decision-making, action, agency, consciousness and cognition. In a word: choice.

In the “classical” world, everything follows laws in a predictable way, so choices are impossible. But in the quantum world, choices and possibilities rule the day. When these two worlds come together, they create a feedback loop of perception and action in biology.

In my paper, I use basic definitions of induction, deduction, and computation along with what we know about QM to show that organisms shape themselves and their environment as a whole, rather than just being made up of separate parts.

I propose that the act of an observer collapsing the wave function in QM is the physical mechanism that produces order and organization in biology, called negentropy. Negative entropy. Order from disorder.

To solve the information problem in biology (and the $10 million Evolution 2.0 Prize), it is important to understand the relationship between cognition and QM. By exploring this connection, we will gain new insights into how life works and how information is processed in living systems.

Read “The role of quantum mechanics in cognition-based evolution” in Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology.

Perry Marshall