Progressing against Physics

Physics – the science that governs everything including biological systems, is prescriptive at human scale. Evolution and the laws of thermodynamics, fundamentally driven by an unambiguous increase in entropy over time, create unassailable constraints on humans. The hold of Physics is so complete that every thought, action, emotion and the motion of electrons are preprogrammed. It leaves absolutely no flexibility for humans to change the course of the future. In this context, current metrics of progress are random observations – illusions of patterns sought out by humans in a desperate attempt to believe they have some control.

At the human scale, time and entropy flow only in one direction – and with it they carry the observable universe and its constituents in a monotonous and constant unwinding of an unforgiving construct. In a quiet and irrelevant corner, humans spend allocated time on treadmills perpetuating the same ideas, executing the same actions and predicting the same future but calling it different names. This is not progress, it is a program.

Progress, then, has to be something that moves against Physics. Glimpses of this is available in the quantum world – where prescriptions cease to exist. A quantum brain may allow humans to break the shackles of human scale Physics. However, evolution – a process grounded on human scale will not favor such an outcome. Thus, the prerequisite for progress is a quantum brain and mind, something that is not possible within human scale systems.

This is paradoxical and programmed.