In episode 21 of the Quantum Consciousness series, Justin Riddle discusses the idea of quantization in quantum mechanics. Early models of the universe viewed reality as comprising a continuous domain of space and continuous domain of time. However, observations in physics revealed that these simple models were inaccurate. All things in the universe are quantized into chunks of matter or light or energy. This discovery gave birth to the field of “quantum” physics which refers to a “quanta” or “unit” of energy. At a fundamental level, the universe is not smooth and continuous but composed of discrete jumps in space and time. Between two points in space and two points in time, there is nothing! There is just ‘here-and-now’ and ‘there-and-then’ with nothing between those space-time moments. This realization breaks down some basic assumptions that we make when we look out at the world around us. Movement is at a basic level a flickering between different discrete configurations. Smooth movement is an illusion!

What does all this mean for the mind? There are a couple different ways to understand the relation of our mind to a flickering physical universe. We could take our mind to be flickering as is suggested by the Stuart Hameroff & Roger Penrose model of orchestrated objective reduction, or we could view the quantum computational level as provided a substrate for continuous experience with a flickering digital body.