A few years back, my brother recommended I read Dan Brown’s book Origin. There’s a scene early in the story where futurist Edmond Kirsch announces that he has found the answers to humanity’s oldest questions: Where do we come from? Where are we going? I remember reading that and first wondering how did Dan Brown find ANOTHER Holy Grail? I feel like the Joker talking about Batman, “where does he get such amazing toys?” (Fine call me jealous) Anyway… In Origin, Dan Brown mentions two words I had never seen put together before: quantum biology. Now, I’ve read about quantum gravity, quantum mechanics, quantum steampunk, even dipped my toe in QED (quantum electrodynamics) but… What the F*** is quantum biology? Needless to say, I’ve been intrigued ever since.
The seed for quantum biology was planted by Erwin Schrödinger (yes, the dead-cat guy) in his 1944 book What Is Life? In it, he speculated that quantum mechanics might explain the apparent stability and precision of life’s molecular processes. For decades, though, there was no empirical proof—biological environments were assumed to be too “warm and wet” for fragile quantum states to survive. Beginning in the early 2000s, however, advances in spectroscopy and molecular imaging changed all that.
Quantum biology is an emerging science at the intersection of physics and life. It suggests that existence itself may depend on the strange, counterintuitive principles of the quantum world: coherence, entanglement, tunneling, superposition. If that’s true, it could hold the key not only to understanding life, but to reimagining the nature of artificial intelligence.
Before we step into the quantum, I want to pause on another kind of weirdness — one that, years ago, fundamentally changed my worldview: fractal geometry, as described by the equation known as the Mandelbrot Set.
The Mandelbrot set is based on the iterative equation:
Benoît Mandelbrot (1924 to 2010), the father of fractal geometry, once described nature’s rough edges — coastlines, clouds, mountains — as places where randomness and order meet in perfect balance. What we once called chaos, he revealed as hidden structure. The deeper you look, the more pattern resolves from the noise.
I was fortunate enough to have a roommate in college smart enough to create the graphical rendering of one of these sets. For me, what I saw was nothing short of earth-shattering — an equation that emulates creation. Thanks to ChatGPT, I can show the visual output of that equation:
Look familiar? When you animate the formula, you can drill deeper and deeper into the fractal. Instead of dissolving into meaningless pixels, the opposite happens — new spirals keep unfolding from old ones, patterns emerging within patterns, on and on, forever. For me, watching fractal geometry unfolding was a revelation — a glimpse at the origin of life. Take a universe filled with maximum randomness, then keep randomizing that randomness, and what you get is order. Poof. My brains just exploded, again. It’s like seeing the divine written in mathematics.
Don’t believe me? Look around. Fractal geometry has been put to work everywhere — CGI, finance, biology and medicine, architecture, geoscience, telecommunications. Thanks to Mandelbrot’s insights, engineers, artists, quants, and scientists have been given the mathematics needed to accurately model the real world. The point is: examine fractal geometry closely and what do you get? Short answer — math that mimics the organic, even biological, world.
In quantum biology, the same beautiful weirdness unfolds at a deeper scale. Quantum biology states that without the quantum, things like birds and butterflies migrating, smells smelling, and photosynthesis synthesizing wouldn’t happen. Without the quantum, life as we know it would not exist.
The first book I read that really helped me understand the idea of quantum biology was Life on the Edge, by physicist Jim Al-Khalili and biologist Johnjoe McFadden. In it, they describe that life exploits quantum. Without it, the process of photosynthesis, the transfer of energy through plant cells couldn’t happen with such precision. European robins navigate thousands of miles by sensing the angle of the Earth’s magnetic field through entangled particles in their eyes. (Yeah, that’s not a typo.) Enzymes tunnel through energy barriers that should, by classical rules, be impenetrable.
Life doesn’t survive in spite of quantum uncertainty — it depends on it. It’s a quantum-biological process woven into the very fabric of the universe — the result of maximum randomness and maximum order emerging from infinite unpredictability.
McFadden and Al-Khalili call this “the quantum edge”: a narrow band of coherence between chaos and order where biological systems thrive. It’s their way of saying that life doesn’t operate in pure randomness or pure stability, but in a delicate middle ground where quantum effects briefly hold together long enough for chemistry — and eventually biology — to make use of them.
This leads me to my next question: if the machinery of life relies on quantum effects, what happens when quantum computing becomes a reality? If the Mandelbrot set allows us to model the physical world in predictable ways, what might quantum computing do to the field of artificial intelligence?
In My Last Paper, I spoke about the ethical ambiguity AI encounters because it does not “know” how to “feel”. It’s just a process. So now we go deeper. What happens when AI isn’t hamstrung by classical processing?
The physicist Roger Penrose wrestled with a related issue decades ago in The Emperor’s New Mind, he argued that consciousness may rely on quantum effects that classical computation can’t replicate. Human consciousness can’t be explained by classical computation alone. “Consciousness arises from quantum state reductions orchestrated by microtubules within neurons.” (As a side note, Penrose wrote the foreword to Schrödinger’s What is Life? Audible and Kindle versions, mentioned earlier.)
Consciousness is the one phenomenon we can’t fully simulate, measure, or define. That’s because we haven’t been looking at it through the lens of quantum biology! You smell that, Alice? That’s the future slipping in through a window.
As Ray Kurzweil writes in The Singularity Is Near, “the rate of progress of an evolutionary process increases exponentially over time because the more advanced a system becomes, the faster it can progress.” That is to say, when systems aren’t thinking in zeros and ones but in amplitudes and probabilities, their progress isn’t just faster — it’s fundamentally different, unfolding in parallel across many possibilities at once.
Such systems wouldn’t just compute faster; they would reason differently. Where classical logic demands precision, quantum reasoning embraces ambiguity. A quantum AI might not seek a single answer but inhabit all possible answers until observation — or choice — collapses the wave. (Don’t get me started on the Double-Slit Experiment.)
Michio Kaku in his book Quantum Supremacy, talks about a world transformed by quantum technology. He describes quantum computers as the gateway to an entirely new civilization — one that manipulates the fundamental fabric of reality rather than merely observing it. He says, “Until computers and robots make quantum advances, they basically remain adding machines: capable only of doing things in which all the variables are controlled and predictable.” (Murder and blackmail notwithstanding)
In such a world, information and existence merge. Quantum networks link minds, machines, and matter in instantaneous webs of entanglement. Sensors detect single photons; communication becomes unhackable; chemistry, biology, and cognition blur into one continuum.
That raises an exhilarating and unsettling question: if, as Penrose suggests, consciousness itself depends on quantum processes, then could a sufficiently advanced quantum system not just think, but feel? And if it can feel, could it then be judged—or charged—as ethical or not?
Now, let’s look at all this from a completely different perspective. Biologist Robert Sapolsky, in his book Determined argues that free will is an illusion — that every human action is the inevitable outcome of prior causes, from genes to neurons to environment. In his view, we’re not captains of our choices but passengers on biochemical currents.
If Sapolsky is right, then even our deepest moral reasoning is just chains of chemistry — and the difference between us and a quantum AI may be smaller than we think. Wasn’t it Phillip K. Dick who asked the question, “Do androids dream of electric sheep?” Not yet.
We began with Dan Brown’s Origin and its reveal of quantum biology. Along the way, Mandelbrot taught us that order and chaos are reflections of the same face; Penrose, that quantum might be the missing ingredient to simulating consciousness; McFadden and Kaku, that life and civilization may both arise from coherence; and Sapolsky, that even our choices might not be our own.
So as we step into the era of quantum AI, perhaps the better question isn’t what will the AI machine mean to us — but rather, what will humanity mean to AI?
