The best explanation of where life comes from, and consciousness, without unnecessary gymnastics. The way McFadden presents his argument is clear and follows one compelling line throughout — what is it, exactly, that characterizes the quality of movement in something living vs something not living? What is movement, exactly? He takes us on a journey from questions of what defines life, to where life came from, to the inevitable field of quantum physics which is required to delve deeper, and finally to a compelling recapitulation, equipped now with concepts such as the inverse quantum Zeno effect, to ask, truly, how the cell arose and remains immersed in a highly quantum level, and how consciousness follows as a quantum mechanical phenomenon.
The final (13th) chapter on consciousness is truly compelling. Having read Penrose, I was expecting an appeal to microtubules, but McFadden did not take it where I expected. It was simpler, more elegant, and left me asking, “How did I not think of that?” A book like this is in great danger of leaning toward too much speculation, but even in the final chapters, McFadden appeals only to scientific facts, and does his job to connect some dots that are easy to spot when they are put together the right way.
I am left with a new perspective now every time I perform any action, make any decision, to appreciate how deeply that decision can be tracked. As McFadden illustrates, when you kick a football, your foot and the football never touch. Even the electrons at the boundary of their particles, getting close, get only close enough to repel one another, a consequence of the Pauli Exclusion Principle. Yet, when we ask what made that kicking action happen, even factoring out the neural processes, we can trace the action down to the processes of individual protons in the enzymes which hook along the actin-myosin chain of a muscle fibre. Or, with regard to the neuron, critical voltage gates are opened or closed based on the quantum state of a single proton. When neurons are inactive, the freedom of this proton to exist in a state of superposition opens up a higher uncertainty in the measured state of the neuron when it is activated and fires (the proton is “measured” in quantum mechanical terms, collapsing a coherent state to a decoherent one). McFadden’s proposed CEM (conscious electromagnetic) field makes sense of EEG and MRI data, particularly the interpretation that the electromagnetic field’s characteristic wave patterns (alpha, beta, gamma, theta, delta) exist in synchronization between disparate brain regions utilized when attention is on one particular thing. The electromagnetic field, being composed of photons with wave-like properties, is subject to the same properties as photons in a 2-slit experiment — interference patterns, particularly — hence when we ask what makes the structure of human thought, feeling, and awareness, it is easier with McFadden’s model to see how it is entirely quantum mechanical, occurring in the quantum field, where the activity of neurons in the connectome are merely mediators of change, acting as a live feedback mechanism for the living organism’s sensory and sensory-processing data.
I am a fan of Penrose’s microtubule model, but on its own I struggled to see how the effects of electromagnetic waves along axons could map to a coherent quantum field by way of the microtubules alone. McFadden’s illustration of the proton-dependent gate-switching at the synaptic cleft provided the missing piece for me. If the phenomenon of consciousness is taking place in this quantum electromagnetic field, then there must still be a strong connection between this field and the activity of neurons — otherwise we risk the awkward mind-body dualism that has troubled philosophers. McFadden eliminated all that, and really, it’s brilliant and will keep me thinking for a long time (pun intended).
What was most fascinating to me was the way by which, as I read this book, I related deeply to some of the experiences I had encountered training in meditation, particularly, during longer retreats when the consciousness experience I have, there is no better term for than “quantum spookiness”. The mind is not what it seems, and you do notice that when you can still the neural processes, inactivating neurons so that more quantum superpositions can build up, and the conscious experience can exist more in the complementary electromagnetic field (the purpose of maintaining a precise, narrow object of concentration), where stranger and stranger phenomena (ie the jhanas) can arise. I knew intuitively I was somehow observing quantum states unmeasured, but could not understand how. Now, thanks to McFadden’s book, I have a model to make sense of it.
I will read more by this author, as I see he wrote two more books. I would love to see him write some day on the mind, perhaps a sequel to this called “quantum consciousness”. Yes, please!