EmeraldBeetle
EmeraldBeetle
That's an excellent question, and I will try to be diplomatic. I should preface what I say with a reasonable certainty that what I've written will be too marmite - too bellicose - to be in the running for any prize. So I'm saying this because it's my honest to God opinion, not because I have any special interest in sniping at competitors.
The first thing I'll say is that this is a difficult topic to have a coherent position on, and we see that in the overwhelming majority of cases. The reason I think is that the question is so specifically about the quantum aspect of life, and in the entirety of the submissions I've seen about two entries which do not make some hideous error in their interpretation of the content of quantum theory. Right off the bat it means the reading experience for most essays is somewhere between science fan fiction and cargo cult gnosticism. To be completely blunt, they are bad. So bad they're not even wrong. A couple are quite nicely written, and would give the lay reader the impression of sophistication, but even these are usually completely hobbled by a sort of second-hard postmodern quantum philosophy. The same faddy interpretational points (which are actually non-problems) that consume popular science discussions are being used as structural architecture, so it's no surprise the edifice that gets built is thoroughly rotten. When you add the confident but utterly wrong prognostications of frontier AI into the mix, you end up drowning in entries which have mastered making superficially plausible sounds but which are completely bereft of any actual understanding.
Not that this is an easy topic! Because even if one does understand quantum the question of how it pertains to life is asking sharp questions in relation to complexity and emergence. A few essays glom onto information as their magic word. This is a great perspective, provided one actually understands quantum complexity, and its relation to classical limits! Safe to say I've not seen much evidence of the latter. This happens to be my exact background, and informed my root scepticism.
When I started doing my reading for this I wasn't sure what to expect. I was already vaguely aware that Plenio had adapted some open system models in the past, and another guy I knew working in the same place (Ulm) who was modelling DNA base pairs as a two-leg tight binding model. This is actually pretty interesting work, and is the kind of place where if I had had more space in the essay, I would have devoted a fair bit of time to analysing it. You can find it here (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010465525001286). There's lots of interesting things to say about this, but the relevant one is that this is starting from a quantum model, and they specifically say the model is too simplistic to capture long-range effects or give any kind of quantitative prediction - precisely the scale problem! It's a valuable toy box, and there's evidence that certain sequences lead to longer lifetimes for excitonic coherences, but that's more or less what you'd expect from any model with distinct local potentials on each site. It might well have some influence on conformational processes, but it's a world away from demonstrating that mechanism, and galaxies away from being able to identify any dependence complex, emergent processes might have on it. Nevertheless, it is interesting, and living in the exact scale where there's some plausibility to it being a factor in what configurations of DNA are favoured. My point here is that knowing the quantum models being employed and exactly the limits of their applicability hugely dims one's confidence in any broad claims that might be inferred from them.
But this is applying the most favourable interpretation I can to the work of a friend in relation to a much larger question. The actual evidence for the claims being made in practically every essay is either non-existent, or based on misinterpretations of old results. From the quantum perspective, the current literature looks more or less the way any expert on many-body quantum systems might expect. If however one's only sources are chatGPT and scientific American you once skimmed, it would be easy to form the opposite impression!
So with all that in mind, if you read these essays with any kind of practical experience in these topics (that is quantum, information, complexity and emergence), the vast majority really stink. A lot of real rubbish, whipped into shape by an inference machine that can imitate fluency but lacks the capacity to generate a principled argument on the topic. As an aside one proposal that keeps coming up which I find slightly laughable is the idea of whacking an NV centre in the middle of your system, as if that will magically tell you something. The physics of those things is pretty non-trivial to understand all by themselves, and it's unclear what testable predictions one could make with it.
But you asked about the ones I liked. There are certainly a couple which I think put forward interesting and (mostly) sensible perspectives, but even then it's hard to escape the sense that they're stuck in quite a dated perspective when discussing emergent phenomena. Moreover my perspective on this stuff has become pretty fixed, so it's hard for me to read any positive proposal and not become wildly frustrated with the inevitable paucity of the argument. Particularly when they all feel the need to pretend it's part of some grand unified theory with its own slogan and acronym. In that sense reading these has been a profoundly depressing caveat. With this caveat, I think there are three (of those I've read) that I could endorse, even if it doesn't stretch to agreement:
Quantum architectures of life: https://qspace.fqxi.org/competitions/entry/2375
Well researched, devotes a lot of time to the historical development perspective. It's literary, and avoids embarrassing itself by allowing its thesis to be yoked to any kind of large-scale effects. This is one where I might push harder at the implications, but I think it's fair to say they demonstrate some fairly current and sophisticated physics knowledge. One of the technical endnotes references a friend's paper, which I enjoyed! This might be my winner.
""Entangled with Life: Mapping Quantum Advantages in Biology" https://qspace.fqxi.org/competitions/entry/2366
It's well written, and for once manages to at least gesture at the caveats. It gets some things wrong about physics, but the message is I think much better considered than most. Still, it leans very hard on speculative presumptions about things that - for all the reasons outlined elsewhere - I find too incredible to believe.
"Scale Shifting: Quantum Biology, Quantum Omics, & a Quantum Biotech Future": https://qspace.fqxi.org/competitions/entry/2400
This one concerns itself with scale! Again, nicely written, and clearly deeply researched. Any critique I would have would be predictable, but I think this presents one of the more coherent (read, less in violent conflict with known fact) perspectives. I think I could have a conversation with this person and we'd find some common ground.
"relative state observer": https://qspace.fqxi.org/competitions/entry/2376
This is yours. I won't lie, I have problems with it, but they stem from the farrago surrounding these Everettian interpretations, which for various reasons strike me as completely unnecessary. To my mind the ultimate relevance to the question is also a bit spurious. Nevertheless, if I can look past the massive problems I have with the premise, I think it's very well put together, and certainly both more engaging and rigorous than almost any other essay I've read here. So I liked it, and my problems with it aren't to do with the argument per se, but the school of thought they're coming from. I think it's a view that can't survive hard contact with the practice of actually doing many-body calculations and quantum-classical limits. That though is a much longer discussion that I'm not really equipped (temporally or mentally) to have in this format. You're welcome to send me a message though!
There was actually one other essay - one of the earliest posted - which largely concerned itself with semantics. I liked it, it had a sensible perspective, but I can't rediscover it in my present browse. Still, you may remember it yourself.
