Quantum Consciousness

Remember the ‘60s? Of course, you don’t. You weren’t born yet. Or if you were, you killed off those brain cells decades ago.

But if you could remember the ‘60s, you’d remember that time (was it at Woodstock?) when a bead-bedraggled, tie dye wearing shaman, asked if she could ‘read your aura’. Of course, she could! It’s the ‘60s, man; everything goes!

“Oh, you’re gorgeous. I see purple and a lovely shade of pink. It shows you’re a kind, generous, loving person. I do see a spot of green you might want to work on but overall, it’s magnificent. By the way, you wouldn’t be able to spare some change by any chance?”  

It was fun while it lasted…but you heard Wall St. calling. Now, more than half a century later, it turns out your shaman was right after all. A recent article by Darren Orf (published 5/13/2025 in Popular Mechanics) confirms what hippies knew ages ago: “You’re glowing!”

Recent studies confirm that living organisms emit ‘biophotons’…lots of them. A live mouse, for example, can emit up to 10⁵ photons per second. “You could even say it glows,” Rudolf, so why don’t we see it? (It would make life so much easier for my cat.) The trouble is, these biophotons are incredibly weak, well below the perceptual threshold of most humans.

Just how weak are they? An advanced digital camera requires a full hour of exposure before it can record enough data to form a coherent pattern. 

It seems likely that all living organisms emit a bio-photonic aura, even prokaryotes (e.g. bacteria), single celled organisms without a nucleus. But, of course, we can’t know that for sure, at least not yet. 

What we do know is that plants do have auras. If a plant suffers some sort of injury, the aura at the site of the injury is especially intense. This suggests that organisms shift into overdrive to repair damage and that they emit more photons in the process. 

How is this related to consciousness? In the 1990s polymath Roger Penrose proposed that consciousness consists of quantum processes that take place in microtubules in the brain. The theory was and is controversial, for a number of reasons. But unexpectedly, experimental evidence is piling up in support of Penrose conjecture. 

We live in a World that spans c. 60 orders of magnitude…“from the Redwood Forest (the cosmic event horizon) to the gulf stream waters (the Planck measure).” (Woody Guthrie) Our lives are confined to just one such order. For example, our touted human awareness (aka consciousness) is limited to events with durations between one-tenth of a second and one full second, one order of magnitude: “Our little life is rounded with a sleep.” (The Tempest)

In recent experiments, scientists have shot photons into microtubules. Amazingly, the light was re-emitted after a period of time no shorter than one tenth of a second and no longer than one full second. Light travels through the microtubules roughly 10 orders of magnitude more slowly than in a vacuum. Whatever is happening in the ‘black box’ results in the phenomenon we call consciousness. 

Sidebar: I rank Roger Penrose as one of the three great intellects of the 20^th century, along with Einstein and Whitehead. Even so, I guffawed when I first heard his theory of consciousness: “Ridiculous!” But these days, more and more skeptics are coming around to his point of view… and now I am one of them.  

But this story is not all unicorns and rainbows! These findings have a potentially more disturbing aspect. To confirm their hypotheses, scientists need a control group. What better control group for a living organism than a deceased one? You might expect that the bioluminescence would switch off at the moment of death. If so, searching for an aura could be a useful way to determine whether a particular organism is alive. 

But nature may not be as neat as we’d like it to be. The evidence is equivocal but seems to suggest that life and death are more of a continuum than a dichotomy. In one study, 30 minutes after ‘death’, mouse bodies continued to radiate photons, albeit at an average rate approximately 40% lower than when they were fully alive. 

These findings suggest that biological activity continues long after ‘clinical death’.  Intriguingly, this is one more bit of evidence to reinforce the emerging ‘bio-continuum’ consensus. 

Collectively, these discoveries constitute a double edged sword. On the one hand, they might increase the window available for resuscitation…or even resurrection. On the other hand, they could challenge the way we customarily handle organic remains.

The assumption that clinical death is synonymous with a total loss of conscious sentience is eroding. What if the deceased organism retains some level of awareness? At the risk of sounding ‘gross’, these findings challenge the morality of treating a ‘dead body’ as ‘refuse’. 

Sticking a loved one in a body bag and then into a refrigerated cabinet to await cremation and/or burial doesn’t seem so attractive any more. Most pre-industrial societies follow a more prolonged and potentially less terrifying process when saying goodbye. 

We’re all familiar, of course, with the Tibetan and the Egyptian Books of the Dead. Two civilizations with little if any cross contact developed remarkably similar traditions. This suggests that these rites rose in response to something fundamentally cross-cultural, e.g. the intuition that life is a continuum.

The traditional Irish wake and the Jewish practice of ‘sitting shiv’ are further manifestations of this tendency. The Nordic tradition of placing a corpse in a boat and sending it into the sea is another. 

Clearly, these are areas that require additional exploration. In the meantime, it seems that somewhat more humane funerary practices are ethically indicated, at least until we have more data.

***

Hilma af Klint’s The Ten Largest, No. 10, Adulthood (1907) bursts with swirling pastel forms that suggest blossoming consciousness and the invisible forces animating life. Executed in egg tempera on paper mounted to canvas, it merges organic curves and floating symbols into an ethereal visualization of spiritual growth and human energy. Part of a series inspired by mystical revelation rather than formal aesthetics, the work channels the aura of adulthood as a transcendent state between earthly experience and higher planes of existence.