Life as the way the universe experiences its own entanglement

CyanEmu

This essay explores a bridge between quantum entanglement and the emergence of life, showing how both challenge reductionist and local views of reality. The Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen argument reveals that quantum relations, unlike classical correlations, are nonseparable and cannot be reduced to interactions between independent parts. Similarly, life emerges not from isolated molecules but from networks where energy, matter, and information form self-sustaining, relational loops. Just as entangled systems derive meaning only as wholes, living systems exhibit holistic organization and hidden informational variables irreducible to local chemistry. Both quantum theory and biology thus point toward a nonlocal, relational view of nature; life as the universe’s way of experiencing its own entanglement.

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Bob

CyanEmu

Hello. Last night I asked myself "Do we make our own reality? It came to me that unless we have an idea or thought our brains will not create the signals between synapse so the idea or thought will not occur. When we think and create a thought or idea an electrical signal will pass between synapse which is compromised of quantum/fundamental particles and quantum physics tells us that these particles can allow for quantum entanglement, where a quantum partical has the ability to appear elsewhere, creating a twin. As Enstien stated "Spooky action at a distance". Therefore your thought exists and may come to be, but you MUST ask the question... Is this what you are saying 🤔. Robert Miles.

ShockwaveRider

Very impressive train of logic, but it ignores the fact that classic logic and the English grammar are both self-contradictory, as is Relativity, and quantum mechanics.

Labs around the world are currently searching for four root metaphors, because the evidence all indicates we occupy a singularity, or giant black hole. In other words, in order to comprehend quantum mechanics, you must be a linguist, because physicists are not paid to describe reality.

CyanEmu

Thank you for your comment. The idea of entanglement goes far beyond the notion that we live inside a singularity or a black hole. In a sense, the “hidden variable” I referred to relates to this: the unseen relational coherence of the universe itself, which may underlie the very energy of life. Consider, for instance, the mystery of "Zygotic Genome Activation": isn’t it a kind of entanglement that hints at a deeper unity of energy and information across the universe?

marcovici alexandru

the observer within paragraph - spaghetti code - don't use GO TO , abstraction principle
first programming languages history

CyanEmu

marcovici alexandru

Thank you for the feedback. The Observer Within paragraph does move across several conceptual layers quickly, and your point about clearer abstraction and smoother transitions is well taken. I appreciate you taking the time to share this perspective.

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I enjoyed reading this. One thing I keep circling: if QM is already a measurement-level framework with obvious resolution limits, then its incompleteness feels… kind of obvious? Not trying to be dismissive, just that an epistemic tool will always break when trying to describe the ontic.

So I’m curious where you place quantum mechanics in your own model.
Do you treat it as a partial description of relational patterns, or as something that’s actually ontic?

Your systems framing made me wonder if you’ve considered that it’s not really about QM versus classic, but about the fact that every attempt at measuring the ontic is going to be incomplete at best.

CyanEmu

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I am truly grateful for your thoughtful and insightful comment. Quantum theory raised a question that eventually became one of the most fundamental and challenging problems in all of modern physics: the measurement problem. This problem subtly points to the deep relationship between our knowledge of the world and the world itself; in other words, between epistemology and ontology.

I find it impossible to draw a clear and complete distinction between ontology and epistemology.

In the essay's framework, quantum mechanics is neither purely ontic nor purely epistemic; it serves as an interface between relational ontology and epistemic accessibility. Entanglement, in particular, is a kind of expression of this interface.

Quantum mechanics cannot be placed solely within either ontology or epistemology. Its own internal tensions make this clear. Any attempt to measure or describe the ontological will inevitably be inadequate, because ontology is inseparably linked to the global state of the universe, including aspects entirely beyond our epistemic access.

The phenomenon of life, as one of the most astonishing features of our world, appears to be a manifestation of this deep interplay between ontology and epistemology. Life suggests a global, coordinated structure that becomes accessible to us only through observation, measurement, and interaction, all of which are mediated by non-global frames of reference.
As an example, consider the activation of a zygote, which remains one of the unresolved puzzles in biology. Over time, scientific inquiry may unravel the mechanisms behind this activation and develop new explanations. Yet somehow these new explanations will likely parallel the process of addressing the contradictions of quantum mechanics: each answer gives rise to further challenges.

In both domains, however, there is something faintly visible on the horizon, something suggesting that the energy or emergence of life seems to arise from deeper ontological layers of reality that are not fully accessible to the epistemic realm. From a purely global (ontological) perspective, perhaps even “life” itself has no distinct meaning, much like the measurement problem. The sharp boundaries we often try to draw — between world and knowledge, observer and observed, reference frame and global frame, ontology and epistemology, life and universe — do not exist (or precisely just exist in a special local situation)

(Some ongoing research initiatives, such as those in the Paradox Science Institute, explore unusual experiential phenomena that may offer further insight into the interplay between life and quantum coherence.)

As Copernicus famously emphasized, the essence of understanding the world is analogy.
And with all these difficulties, what analogy could be more fitting for understanding both quantum mechanics and life than using each as a mirror for the other?

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CyanEmu Gosh I love your reply. I also feel/sense that otherness that sits just past what we can see. For me it feels like when you see something just at the edge of your peripheral vision but can’t see it when you turn to look. Whether that ontologic substance is God or science or rules or whatever it is, I call it Sharon. It seems to me like QM is the closest we’ve gotten to Sharon, at least until we get to the next fractal layer of the measurement devices. I find it fascinating to look at the places where our tools break and to see that they all break in the same way, in patterns that echo that same blurry feeling at the edges.

CyanEmu

Bob

Thank you for sharing your thoughts and concerns on this topic.
The starting point of "creating a thought" is not easy to trace, and I doubt that it is completely free from forms of entanglement. I can recall many experiences (both my own and those of people I know) where someone became aware of the death of a friend or relative at the exact moment it happened: seeing an image, dreaming of a conversation, or suddenly thinking of them intensely, without knowing anything yet. Only later, when the news arrived, did they realize it was not just a random disturbance of the mind.
There are also moments when two people suddenly think of the same word or idea at the exact same time. So not only do thoughts not originate purely from our will (and where exactly is the “starting point” of will?), but what happens within the flow of our thinking seems to draw on a structure far more complex and non-local than we usually assume.

Regarding the idea of “making our own reality,” I don’t think it works in an absolute one-sided way. Our thoughts and feelings operate within a pre-existing context: environmental conditions, memories, and emotional patterns that echo through the structure of our brain and body.
So it’s not that we fully create our own reality; rather, it is more accurate to say that we intervene in (our) reality, or participate in shaping the part of it that becomes meaningful to us.

CyanEmu

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Your profound metaphor about “something seen out of the corner of the eye” reminded me of two interesting parallels: one, obviously, from quantum physics and the other from Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious.
In quantum theory, even the act of measurement changes the state of the system. The moment we try to see something more clearly, we partly disturb it, and a new layer of uncertainty appears where we expected clarity. Jung noticed something similar in psychology: when we try to illuminate the unconscious with sharper conceptual tools (our “measurement”), the phenomenon itself seems to shift, becoming harder to pin down.

“Sharon” is an intriguing word, much like the wavefunction, Tao, or Zen! : )
Perhaps the only exciting feature of our ignorance is this layered process itself: every new insight resolves one question only to reveal a (some) deeper and more interesting/complicated one beneath it.
As John Wheeler beautifully put it:

“We live on an island surrounded by a sea of ignorance. As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of ignorance.”

Moreover, there is also a quiet parallel to questions in origin-of-life research. As we probe how prebiotic chemical networks begin to generate information or directional behavior, the line between “observer” and “observed system” becomes increasingly blurred. In systems operating near the threshold of life, observership is itself an emergent property, arising not from an external agent, but from the internal organization of the system as it crosses critical levels of complexity.

I’m genuinely curious how you see the parallels between these domains.

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CyanEmu I have so so so many thoughts in this vein of thinking, basically about how it feels like everything is operating under the same set of rules. Whatever makes those rules, I couldn’t keep rotating whether I called it god/the universe/Science/art/philosophy/etc so I just call it Sharon. I find it most fascinating how all of our systems fail in the same ways, at that blurred edge where they ricochet off the atmosphere of Sharon. (I also sometimes struggle to turn my thoughts into words, so I don’t think this reply is as clear as I would like). I’ll see if I can make these ideas cleaner, and I would love to continue this conversation.

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CyanEmu I don’t know if this will be any clearer, but I’m going to try. 🙂 The way it makes sense to me, the substrate itself is ontologic, substrate being whatever unknowable entity is the essence/building block of everything. My son says, “hey Mommy! Did you know everything is made of space dust?!” To me, substrate is ontologic, and everything else is epistemic, and that’s why everything fails as it approaches that boundary - the ontologic is unknowable from inside the system it has created. Science, math, religion, philosophy, etc, every tool we’ve built to understand our world, they work beautifully within the system, but they all fail (in remarkably similar ways) when they try to describe the substrate. Like you said, even as we seem to get a closer or deeper understanding, new questions emerge. To borrow from calculus, we can approach 0 but never reach it.