A glorious 2025 comes roaring in despite the nastiness of contemporary American and (some) worldwide politics. Everyone’s angry, despite the ingenious control of murderous pathogens, the brilliant performance of the post-COVID economic recovery in the United States, dropping crime rates, and the continued progress on reducing and eliminating worldwide poverty. But these are aggregate measures of social and scientific success and far too many individuals remain discontented with their own status and fears that social forces beyond their control are limiting their success and happiness.
In this, one must be circumspect: reading out stats that contradict the mood is not reading the room. So, instead, I try to focus on unexpected innovations that lead us to defocus on our own situational context and towards a larger reimagining. This is a modern therapy that isn’t dismissive of the effectiveness of our highly successful institutions of scientific achievement, peace-preserving world orders, and liberal democracies that effectively balance individual freedoms against order. It’s a celebration of them, instead.
I give you two new joys as the new year starts to build. First, we have the novel realization that dark energy and matter might be better explained by relativistic distortions of space-time in the universe based on the quantities of matter in denser versus void-like areas of space. Here’s Anton Petrov with a primer:
This certainly simplifies things if true, but it needs to be observationally verified and reconsidered if it doesn’t pan out. There’s that underlying joy in science: everything is tentative because we are all flawed.
The second development changes from an external focus on the monumental scale of the universe to something much more human. I’ve previously covered the curious theory of quantum consciousness proposed by Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff, but there have been some recent developments. Again, the excellent videos of Anton help to understand this new evidence for how quantum effects might be able to act on networks of microtubules similar to what are present in animal cells and, more relevantly, neurons, and at relatively high temperatures:
But even if this effect is found to be operating in our brains, there remains the vexing question of how consciousness operates given all that. The presence of quantum superposition or super-luminescence in tubules in no way leads to any particular conclusions about how consciousness operates. We just don’t know, though there are some curious clues along the way. For instance, xenon anesthesia works despite the fact that xenon can’t bind with anything at everyday human temperatures. It appears to operate by changing NMDA rather than GABA pathways like many anesthetics. In doing so, what mostly seems to be happening is that the noble gas interferes with neuronal communications and the vast waves of neuronal activity change and reduce and consciousness fades away. This is nothing new, but curious, and it would need to be demonstrated that somehow something like xenon is having a quantum effect rather than a chemical influence that may be more shape/structural rather than chemically binding.
Even if quantum effects can be established, we have no real clue about how consciousness operates beyond the relatively simple conclusion that it has to do with brains.
But, there, we have new joy for 2025. Even as politics focuses on the pettiness of power, the universe and the mind remain beautiful mysteries. We can roll around the ideas, test their limits, reduce them to dinner party banter, but live a richer life that extends beyond our fears, desperations, and sense of doom. And, in my humble theater of ideas, where contingency and truth collide and filter down into meaning, I hold tight to that joy of implications and extensions that can modestly help push back the worst of our inclinations that arise as specters from the old, demon-haunted world.
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