Years ago, I proposed that the immaterial feel of our minds might be the result of fields playing a major role in our thinking. An article, Neurons Talk Without Synapses, discusses recent work that shows neurons `talk’ to each other by way of changes in electromagnetic fields and not just by direct electrochemical contact.
I think there may well be similar effects due to quantum fields, meaning there may well be quantum effects coordinating the activities of specialized cells, which means that there would be quantum effects at the level of certain cells. There might well be cells which will change state as a result of the transition of an individual electron to a different level of energy. At the same time, I strongly disbelieve in any quantum magic that provides us with `consciousness’ or `freedom’. If we look for freedom where it’s not to be found, then we may convince ourselves there is no freedom.
As one example of the `survival usefulness’ of quantum effects, they would allow animals to be unpredictable black-boxes from the viewpoint of predators. Otherwise, a specific family-line of creatures might develop a tendency to go right more often than not when trying to escape a dangerous predator. In fact, there are cells involved in motor control which are so finely balanced in their electrochemical states that the transition of a single electron in one of those cells might be sufficient to put it in a new state. Of course, it’s very conjectural to write about a capability which might be useful to the survival of creatures in a world of dangerous predators. We should be careful when engaging in such potentially ill-disciplined speculations. Evolutionary theory is the most empirical, fact-based, of all branches of scientific thought, but it’s a part of the world which has proven to be part of a realm of created being which has abstract regions which can only be understood by corresponding ways of thought, with those ways of thought be our ways of shaping our minds to those abstract regions rather than being ways adopted by some pre-existing mind which can somehow think in occultist ways, ways transcendental to the regions of being in which the human being himself is to be found.
We should be clear about the nature of reality and of the abstract regions from which our world is shaped and about the ways in which our minds are formed as we respond to concrete and abstract regions of created being. Some of those abstract regions are manifested in our minds as mathematical systems. What evolutionary biologists study isn’t just some sort of `after-the-fact’ factual results of some mystical randomness but rather a true factuality being played out, a narrative-based factuality.
Most modern human beings seem to think of `randomness’ in terms of something coming out of an occult dimension, not so glorious as the transcendental regions from which our minds and best thoughts originate but still better than the mundane stuff of earthly life. Even some otherwise sophisticated thinkers from various fields of science accept this strange mysticism as being hardheaded realism. This occultist view of randomness is a literalization of formal definitions from so-called probability theory, itself more a pedagogic tool easily folded into a fully-deterministic measure theory.
We modern men truly possess that perverse literacy and the resulting invincible ignorance which Thomas Jefferson saw in his fellow-Americans in the early 1800s. See The Size of Human Freedom for a discussion of the nature of randomness.