Quantum Slime Molds
Quantum thoughts about quantum thinking
1.
In January, I attended Rabbitholeathon, a weekend retreat for research nerds. A group of us — aged 18-34 — came together to explore topics that live, as the cool kids say, rent free in our minds (possibly the cool kids have stopped saying this).
More than anything else, the point of the weekend was to give ourselves the opportunity to clear our schedules, take time to deep dive into the things we’re fascinated by, and share them with other people equally intrigued by niche rabbitholes. Also, to make friends!
We tracked our research using Hyperlink Academy, a very cool collaborative container conceived by Brendan, a mutual friend who is himself very cool. Here’s my workspace, as a reference point.
My guy, I cannot tell you how long I have been waiting to talk about quantum consciousness — specifically, to people who want to hear about it and are not being held hostage in conversation out of “obligation to our friendship” or wtv.
You can check out my prez deck above, and the tl;dr below:
I’d read this essay on subatomic entanglement between beings some time ago, and absolutely adored the idea that concepts like fate, and destiny, and twin flames could have scientific grounding. That humans, just like particles (because, after all, isn’t that inherently all that we are?) are interconnected across space and time — you can’t impact one soul without influencing another.
Science and spirituality are two sides of the same faith, and if you squint really hard, you can draw loose parallels between mirror neurons and telepathic sensitivity. Specifically: the idea that mirror neurons exist beyond just the call-and-response that happens when we’re physically face-to-face with each other. These mirror neurons might activate over virtual coordination; these neural linkages may last lifetimes.
My friend Lena has this beautiful notion that cognitive empathy — the ability to feel for someone on the other side of the world from you, whom you’ve never met, whose life experiences look nothing like your own — is a recent evolutionary adaptation borne from globalization. Tribe empathy is effortless, when your tribe is homogenous. But now that our proverbial tribe spans continents, empathy is as hypothetical as it is tangible.
We’re inherently social creatures — that much, we know. And there are theories that imply that our limbic system — the core of our gut-brain connection; the driver of our so-called “gut instincts” — is home to our hive mind. Which is to say: when we’re acting acting from our gut, we’re acting through our collective consciousness — the same collective consciousness that tell birds in flight when to turn together, and honeybee colonies to think in tandem. (Don’t quote me on this though bc I cannot cite my sources bc I cannot resurface them.)
But we think therefore we are — we’ve evolved to communicate through conscious conversation. And that’s not to say that we’ve lost access to our subconscious hive mind — it’s more to say that we have less reason to tap back into that frequency of “thought”.
But: if there was reason to tap back into that frequency, might we be able to collectively cultivate cognitive telepathy?
Enter: Daniel Schmachtenberger. In an interview with Jim Rutt, Daniel speaks to the evolutionary flywheel between predator and prey. Every time a predator has gained evolutionary advantage in the past, per Darwinism, prey have mutated in turn — and vice versa. Every time lions get faster, only the fastest gazelles survive, and therefore, those genetics are passed down. Meaning that the cycle of genetic advantage is fair and balanced between species.
But now, humans have become the apex predator…not just to other forms of life, but also to ourselves: “[…] if we look at Putin’s killing ability or Trump’s compared to yours or mine, it might be billions or trillions of times more, and the same we could say for economic capacity”.
Not to mention: the genetic mutation that’s led to evolutionary advantage among predators within our society is apathy (at least, in my purview): the number of sociopaths and psychopaths in positions of power is staggering. That’s because most rational (read: empathetic) people aren’t looking to assert authoritative control over their tribe — as emotional prey, it is the fact that we care about each other that makes us all the more vulnerable to sociopathic and psychopathic predators within our hive.
So what can we do? How do we turn our emotional weaknesses into compassionate strengths? What evolutionary adaptation might safeguard us as prey?
If we think about cognitive telepathy as the natural evolution of cognitive empathy — this concept of mirror neurons firing over virtual connection, not just physical proximity — then wouldn’t it make sense that conscious hive mind becomes our evolutionary advantage? Psychopaths can mimic empathy, but they cannot emote it — which means that by definition they are excluded from the tribe. And empathy itself is just an application of collective consciousness — which is only a step away from collective cognizance, after all.
2.
One friend I made that weekend was Sristhi, a neuroscientist who does research in exactly this. Tell me that isn’t an act of fate — a manifestation of quantum entanglement itself, that led us both to Austin at the same place, same time!!
Coincidentally, and unsurprisingly, Srishti’s rabbithole was also on quantum consciousness, but from a much more scientifically sound perspective. You can check out her presentation here.
Almost all of it goes over my head, but the essence that I understand is this:
Most people are familiar with the primary premise of the double slit experiment: that the very act of measuring a wave changes that measurement in itself. You cannot observe a particle without inadvertently influencing its actions. As Sristhi puts it: Superposition, by definition, is not observable. Anytime you observe, you collapse wave function.
But there’s a nascent thesis pushing back against this: objective reduction. The burgeoning notion is that in this very same double split experiment, even without observation, electrons take the same actions — they collapse in the same way that they do when they are being measured.
From the most granular implications of evolution, these electrons make choices that are most advantageous to their survival — to pass through the slit.
I’m one hundo p butchering this, but my very superficial understanding of orchestrated objective reduction, based on Sristhi’s presentation, is that the reason electrons are able to “survive” is because the unstable superpositions (e.g. electrons that don’t make it through the slit, and therefore didn’t survive) have some semblance of gravitational orbit that influences decision making for other electrons.
And when we talk about decision making at the level of electrons, what we’re really talking about is quantum computing by microtubules — the closest level of cognition that exists for these particles. If we’re really gonna dumb it down, my understanding is that microtubules are essentially "mission control" for electrons. And quantum computing is effectively the equivalent of neural processing, for microtubules.
If we extrapolate electrons to neural networks, we see microtubules operating in the same way. It turns out that within the individual subatomic particles of our neurons (still paraphrasing from Sristhi here) there are microtubules that are active in our brains, that are also responding to some kind of slight gravitational orbit grounded in some kind of collective call-and-response.
Sidebar: this piece is a thought experiment for myself, so the implications of inaccurate analysis are pretty low stakes — but for those of you with the alpha on Digest, this section would be a perfect application of pull requests. What I’d love to be able to do is submit a formal pull request to Sristhi to make sure that I’m accurately citing and translating her work — so she can approve it before it’s published. Because I’m not super confident about what I’m stating here, I could also leverage Digest’s RFC (request for comments) feature: I can save this essay as a public draft, which would then make it surfaceable through the social reading widget. People doing research on relevant topics would have this draft recommended to them through our semantic context engine, giving them opportunity to contribute and/or lend their expertise on the subject matter. Then, I could version up, with my crowdsourced annotations and edits attached as part of that merge — and my collaborators credited in the final output.
3.
A couple years ago, this presentation, titled “Organizations as Slime Molds” made its way around DAO circles. Long story short is that as organizations scale, they become less effective and efficient over time. In startups, an emergent operational structure mimics that of slime molds: independent teams tend to branch off in random and discordant pathways, and thus diverge over time. But if you do a good job at vision setting, you’ll see eventual convergence between groups. It’s non-linear and unforeseeable, how these paths will, or might, eventually reconnect — but maintaining a culture that’s “loosely coupled, tightly aligned” increases the probability of eventual convergence. You’re enabling full autonomy, with the trust that people are building towards the same outcomes, and therefore will find their way back together when the timing is right.
A quote that I like, for selfish reasons: “Good strategic work looks wasteful or indulgent in the moment.”
One thing that is true of slime molds and definitely not true of people and teams acting within organizations: sacrifice is part of the process.
Slime molds are smart. You can’t read up on slime molds without learning about the Tokyo rail experiment: researchers from Hokkaido University replicated a map of the greater Tokyo area, designed, naturally, by engineers, onto a petri dish, using oats (e.g. food) to represent major urban centers. “As the plasmodium sent its tendrils over the map, it continually changed its branches, strengthening some and weakening others. After a day, it had created a network that was almost identical to Tokyo’s actual rail network. Human designers had created that network to be as efficient as possible; the slime mold had done the same, but without any brainpower.”
The very essence of this efficiency is that willingness to sacrifice: slime molds are able to move fast, because part of that iteration process means killing off (or shrinking down, or merging) blobs that have taken inefficient routes — leaving only the most productive pathways behind. Effectively, slime molds crowdsource knowledge, and cut out what doesn’t work.
Here’s another study on brainless intelligence: yeast mothers sacrificing themselves for their children.
“Working with yeast, the UCSF team developed sophisticated microscope and computer techniques that allowed them to track the movement of mitochondria within cells. If these structures had divided randomly, they would expect to find fewer in the bud than in the mother (since the buds are smaller than the mother).
What they found instead was that the yeast mothers gave a consistent amount of mitochondria to their offspring at each generation, and so over time they had fewer and fewer of the organelles themselves. The price they paid to ensure their offspring was healthy was steep: The yeast mothers would eventually give away too many of the mitochondria to survive and begin to die off after 10 generations. By 20 generations, most of the mothers had died.”
What’s interesting about these conclusions to me is their similarity to superposition and the double slit experiment — the difference between logistical expectation and “emotional” outcome. Once again, if you squint really hard, and are extremely liberal with your application of ~real science~, these mitochondrial permutations might remind you of microtubules within electrons. In the same way that microtubules can make decisions based on the slight gravitational orbits of electrons that don’t “survive”, slime molds can make decisions for the good of the hive, by sacrificing parts of their colony for the sake of herd efficiency.
And, like yeast mothers sacrificing themselves for their offspring, these decisions tend to look empathically driven.
4.
Recently, I read Recursion, a thriller about time travel. Some spoilers: the latter half of the book sees our protagonist returning to the same point in time, over and over again, in desperate desire to prevent global collapse. She kills herself off, time and time again, for the sake of everyone else, slowly draining her own morality in sacrifice of universal humanity.
Each restart, she maintains her knowledge of former life spans — dead timelines, they’re called, because once she effectively “restarts the clock” they exist in primitive memory only (like slime molds because I’m really pushing this analogy here), but those lifetimes no longer have happened. Once the rest of the world catches up to that rewind moment, they regain their memories of these dead timelines too. Eventually, our male protagonist goes back in time to the point before any of these parallel timelines have branched off — he returns to a point in time where only he continues to carry that knowledge of parallel life spans, and can cut off that turning point at its root.
You know what this reminds me of? The Black Mirror episode “Hang the DJ”. We spend the entire episode witnessing two people in love conquer a world that wants to keep them apart, and find out at the very end that these versions of our main characters are just simulations in a larger dating algorithm to determine their compatibility.
That entire parallel reality we just witnessed is one out of 1,000 simulations keeping them apart. Their compatibility score is 99.8%, meaning that in 998 of these realities, they find a way to end up together, despite the entire simulated universe being against them.
Increasingly, I feel like this universe we are living in is simply one of an infinite number of parallel universes, simulated in desperate desire to uncover a pathway where the collective actions of humanity do not end in global collapse. Perhaps this is simply one “hard fork”, per Schmachtenberger.
Like the characters in Recursion, we are living out a timeline out of our control, and like Black Mirror, the ~Higher Forces~ above us are pitting every environmental condition against us — a pressure cooker, toggling various factors to challenge us to make the right choices — so our original timeline has a better shot at survival.
If we fail, like slime molds, we are cut off — and that primitive memory is merged into the collective consciousness of our original (e.g. non-simulated) reality. And perhaps, if we survive, we branch off into a parallel universe, where we exist in tandem with these divergent realities, crowdsourcing knowledge through quantum consciousness — loosely coupled, but tightly aligned.
Each decision we make has an equal and opposing decision based on the gravitational orbits of these quantum microtubules: our neural networks are in constant, quantum conversation with one another. You cannot influence one parallel reality without impacting another.
And who knows? Perhaps, at some point, all of our infinite, parallel timelines will converge again, by some higher, Universal order, when the timing is right :)