The Quantum Architectures of Life: From Superradiance to Sentience

RedCrow

Addressing the extent of life’s quantumness presupposes an answer to the equally fraught question, “What is life?”, which became the essential focus of Erwin Schrödinger’s 1943 Trinity College lectures. New science from quantum optics is pointing to how the “unsurveyably intricate” architectures of life—as Schrödinger observed—harness ordered collections of photoexcited molecular qubits in proteins for exquisite information processing, above thermal noise, which Schrödinger had not anticipated. Answering how these photons shape the processes of life, and its sentient behaviors, requires a journey from life’s origins in light, to the quantum union of light and biomatter in the evolving cosmos. As these vast interconnected webs of information flowing through life point to shadows of the mind, they will return us to ancient cosmologies and the role of the observer in quantum measurement.

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RustDeer

It is particularly compelling, as this article examines how photoinduced quantum processes in biomolecules may sustain structures of coherence and information processing within living systems, and how these dynamics—touching the boundaries between perception, consciousness, and measurement—revive ancient cosmological questions regarding the role of the observer in the constitution of reality, in addition to its well-chosen references on the subject.