EVOLUTION: QUANTUM OR ANALOGUE PROCESSING?

We now know a little about molecular processing, but molecules are made up of particular combinations and precise arrangements of atoms. They are processors, logical processors.

But is the real processing power beneath the skin of those machines? If so, is it quantum or analogue processing? It certainly is not digital. Analogue might seem the most likely on the face of it, and perhaps on the face of it it is.

But beneath the beneath, what if it is quantum? That would certainly explain how there is the staggering amount of computing power needed to get from atoms to simple molecules to massively complex proteins and finally to us. And how there is such staggering processing power in the brain. Are billions of neurons, or quintillions of molecules really enough to accomplish what we do every second? Or what a miniscule flying insect does?

That seems unlikely. It also seems unlikely that all those sub-atomic particles are just there to make up larger entities, or even only to provide electrons and ions for subsidiary functions.

So perhaps the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was on the right track, and the earth is a computer--or more accurately the whole universe. As the poet said, 'The stars, which are the very brain of heaven'; and George MacDonald in At the Back of the North Wind used the phrase 'thinking stars.' Perhaps they were right, and the universe is highly active in a very different way to what traditional physicists imagine.

The universe: Heaven's creation-machine.