Enzyme function and a potential model for consciousness by Robert Gatenby скачать в хорошем качестве

Enzyme function and a potential model for consciousness by Robert Gatenby

Although enzyme function is often characterized as a decreased activation energy, the mechanism of action involves altering the quantum interactions of substrate molecules. The need to understand this fine graining (molecular structures acting at quantum level interactions) process led me to consider the key role of dimensionality in information dynamics in living systems. That is, the string of amino acids encoded by genetic information becomes functional only when it folds into a 3-dimensional structure. Protein folding, when governed only by thermodynamics, is a random process with many possible (lower free energy) outcomes. However, living systems, by controlling the kinetics of protein folding, ensure a single final, optimally functional configuration out of the many possible structures - effectively increasing Shannon information. Perhaps this "dimensionality" mechanism to increase information also works at the cellular level as interactions among proliferating cells ensure cellular proliferation results in a highly non-random, functioning multicellular structure out of all possible 3-dimensional configurations. Again, this highly controlled change in dimensionality permits the increased information necessary for multicellularity. Humans, unlike all other living systems, explicitly recognize, measure, and predict time. My hypothesis is that this increased dimensionality, in turn, allows access to information not available to other living systems and characterized (by us) as "consciousness". An extension of this hypothesis is that consciousness resides in the dimension of time and, therefore, interacts with but is exterior to the spatial dimensions.