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FQxI Essay Competition

25,000 character limit (about 8 pages). The essay must be readable and understandable to non-specialist audiences, not overly technical.

• Is the essay relevant to the theme?
• Is the essay interesting?
• Is the essay rigorously argued?
• Is the essay accessible?
  • Clearly written: The essay should be easy to understand and enjoyable to read.
  • Not overly technical: Equations may be included in the essay, but we advise against this. If equations are used, the accompanying text must still be fully understood without them; otherwise, the essay could be disqualified for being too technical.
  • A diverse, well-educated, but non-specialist audience, aiming in the range between the level of Scientific American and a review article in Science or Nature, should be able to read and understand this essay.
• Optional criterion: Novel experimental approaches

How Quantum is Life?

Does the Krebs cycle run through quantum symmetries?

Write from the point of view of an alien suggesting to humans a research program.

The problems humans have in thinking.

• Not able to think more than one track or perspective at a time.
• Thinking in words - try to think without them.
• Magical thinking with words such as "physics", "biology", "quantum", "life" but that will not yield deep insights.
• Not thinking with diagrams, not using equations but nevermind.

A suggested research program

• Think in terms of the three minds - not just opposites but resolving them.
• Think in terms of absolutes: the twosome, threesome, foursome.
• Epistemology: Biology (definition of life), Physics, Chemistry, Biochemistry (compare the ways). 42->24
• The fivesome as the basis for physics. Physics as a matter of two frames.
• The quantum narrative for the collapse of the wave function. Sheffer polynomials, Wick's theorem and the combinatorial alternative to the wave function.
• Synchronizing the three minds with the divisions of everything and their collapse. Bott periodicity, quantum symmetries and their combinations. The collapse of the wave function in terms of quantum symmetries. Choice frameworks.
• God fermionic and God bosonic.

Thinking without words.

• People today are inclined to look in terms of material implementations but that is only half of the story.
• Will present techniques for understanding concepts. They shed light on the question "how quantum is life" but not as a spotlight but rather lighting up the entire room.

I suggest to humanity a research program by which you could engage any being, including yourselves, as having three minds and eight mental contexts. I will identify these with the three quantum symmetries (time reversal, particle-hole, chirality) and eightfold real Bott periodicity. I will point to the Krebs cycle, the metabolic eight-cycle in every living cell on Earth, as a template for consciousness that you should investigate. I will try to be rigorous without equations, accessible without pictures, interesting without dialogue, enjoyable without fiction, relevant without vapidity, original without personal history, as you desire.

Humans have a marked propensity to think in terms of words, which explains their stupidity. Every thought can be thought in words, hopefully, but not every thought need be or should be. The first thing for humans to learn is to think with all three minds, which is to say, to think with the third mind. Yes, there are humans who do, and sporadically, all do. But mostly humans are just going through motions, executing the prejudices of their first mind, and prattling cliches, the preconceptions of their second mind.

The first mind, of course, is the answering mind, which unconsciously knows answers. The second mind is the questioning mind, which consciously does not know, thus asks questions. The third mind is the investigating mind, which balances the other two, so that we have the same information in both forms, what we know and what we don't know, and then selects which mind to act upon that.

Thus in human biology,