The Death of a Superposition
This text is a follow up on my paper Does Culture Need Humans, originally published as an addendum to the book Encyclopedia of Internet Memes and Phenomena. In that paper I argued that memes control genes, and since culture is the main force driving the evolution of homo sapiens, it is a quasi-living entity that is also the pinnacle of evolution. In this paper I would like to go on exploring and expanding this concept by adding the emergence of reality and consciousness.
Common sense likes to keep track of current high tech. In the beginning things worked due to the will of gods. Later on, in the industrial age people saw all complex mechanisms as clockwork. Nowadays, in the age of information, everything seems to work like computers. So now let’s say living cells are quantum computers. Right away we should note that quantum computers are the proposed new frontier of computing, that are to use quantum bits instead of transistors, should they come true, could be excellently weaponized to break encryption and do other things too. Cells, on the other hand, cannot do that, but they reproduce and repair themselves, working their way around in their environment. We better put it in a mildly different way: cells are the original quantum computers. They do compute and they do lots of quantum stuff. They can see the light, wavelengths of it, even harvest it, they also can sense the magnetosphere of our planet, work magic with enzymes, exchange information. Cellular life has a intimate relationship with the quantum world, which it knows a lot more than we do.
Life’s mode of operation, its measurements, and relationship to the quantum world gives rise to the reality we know, and even though consciousness doesn’t seem to create the Universe, life may have a lot more to do with the midscale reality of the world we live in. Up to this point, we are moving along the lines of Robert Lanza’s biocentric universe theory, and go a bit further: it’s about the accumulation, complexity, and evolution of information. It’s a culture-centric universe. Here, natural selection is not even a tool, it’s finding anything worth salvaging in death. It’s not enough to survive, you need to be safe, and the universe is not safe.
Thus our original quantum computer has an attitude. It has no measurement problem. Nature hates superposition, its life depends on collapsing the wave function and creating that one living universe out of the fog of multiverse. It’s not even an interpretation, just a reading of Schrödinger’s cat: this is where the underlying mathematical beauty of the universe begins, with the creation and production of information. Information as in something which stands for something else. Who reads then?
When probable impossibilities meet
As per the original thesis culture moves like a ghost in front of life. It starts slow, but on the wave of complexity eventually rides in the perfect tool for the goal: a network of a hundred billion quantum computers, a creature with the conscious brain. After eons of working out symbiosis, social species, protocultural memes, culture is no longer a shadow below the waves, it can really start to live in its own body, which is language, moving freely as the pure software of the quantum brain.
The first living cell is a really persistent improbability (not ruling out creation by a momentary Boltzmann-God) it grows exponentially, since from the very first moment it wants to take over the world. Consciousness on the other hand has a lot on its plate, doesn’t really feel efficient and most of the time it doesn’t seem to be bothered with total universal domination.
We are high functioning primates that are not completely fit for survival were it not for integrating some multi-dimensional factors around and inside ourselves. Consciousness is strange, because is not us. It partly feels alien, partly unreal. Much of it we sometimes call social construct, though society is just as much a construct of culture as are humans. Some of it seems to be simulation, which would bring us back to life creating our reality (and the fear that it might not be real enough for us to complete our mission).
Consciousness is the mark on our forehead. It is easy to get lost in the mirror hall of hard problems, harder to enjoy the journey inside culture. The good news is, even though we are moving against the flow of the Big Bang and do not know yet how it will work out, we always control more of the Universe, than we think.
