‘Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” ‘ Genesis 1:26-28
In the 1990s, Nobel-Prize winning physicist Dr. Roger Penrose, along with anesthesiologist, Dr. Stuart Hameroff, developed a theory about the “physical” state of consciousness called “Orchestrated Objective Reduction Theory (Orch OR). The theory was that consciousness exists as a quantum process thanks to microtubes.
The theory was “debunked” by the belief that quantum states can only be sustained by cold conditions, but a new experiment by oncology professor Dr. Jack Tuszynski suggests the brain is neither “too hot or too wet” to sustain the quantum state needed for consciousness to exist through the microtubes inside the brain’s nerve cells.
Microtubes are essentially protein lattices that form the structural network of the nerve cell. According to Orch OR theory, they possess quantum properties that allow consciousness to be “everywhere all at once,” connected to the whole of the universe. This state creates quantum entanglement, where particles can connect to each other across any length of space.
The problem with the theory, again, is experiments up to this point showed that the quantum state could not be sustained under warm conditions, but that thought has changed with Dr. Tuszynski’s work. His experiment showed that the quantum state was sustained for more than enough time (a fraction of a second) to allow for “consciousness,” quantum entanglement with all of creation, to exist.
From Popular Mechanics:
His team simulated shining a light into a microtubule, sort of like a photon sending an exciton through a plant structure. They were testing whether the energy transfer from light in the microtubule structure could remain coherent as it does in plant cells. The idea was that if the light lasted long enough before being emitted—a fraction of a second was enough—it indicated quantum coherence.
Specifically, Tuszynski’s team simulated sending tryptophan fluorescence, or ultraviolet light photons that are not visible to the human eythe, into microtubules. In a recent interview, Tuszynski reports that, across 22 independent experiments, the excitations from the tryptophan created quantum reactions that lasted up to five nanoseconds. This is thousands of times longer than coherence would be expected to last in a microtubule. It’s also more than long enough to perform the biological functions required. “So we are actually confident that this process is longer lasting in tubulin than … in chlorophyll,” he says. The team published their findings in the journal ACS Central Science earlier this year.
The experiment does not, in and of itself, prove the Orch OR theory, but it removes the knock-down argument against it, that the brain isn’t cold enough to sustain the quantum states needed to create “consciousness.”
The article in Popular Mechanics introduces Dr. Timothy Parker, who takes the Orch OR theory to the multiverse, claiming that consciousness is the fruit of the quantum awareness of multiple universes reflected the infinite “chances” of creation. His work is even more speculative and, perhaps, untestable, than the theory of consciousness in a mono-universal reality is.
For this writer, these theories and experiments are scratching at the mystery that is the image of God, that is, the ability of the human to see as God sees, and seeing is not just seeing in the material sense, but in the moral and ethical sense. We know good and evil as God knows it, or we know good and evil as a rebellion against God’s creation (which we cannot possess if we also don’t know the contrast, God’s knowing of good and evil, we can rebel against).
‘Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?” And the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.’” But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” ‘ Genesis 3:1-5
This writer doubts the material and even quantum scientist can ever fully define in measurable, finite terms, what consciousness is, what gives us will to act in the first place, but yet science, in this case, can affirm the shadow of the material and quantum reality of God word resting in all of us.
‘For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things. Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen. ‘ – Romans 1:20-25