Gardner’s Selfish Biocosm hypothesis challenges both Darwinists and advocates of intelligent design, and forces us to reconsider how we ourselves are shaping the future of life and the cosmos.

BIOCOSM provides the foundation for a new set of ethical imperatives and insights.

Science should not divorce itself from the ethical, legal, and social implications of new theories. BIOCOSM identifies three key ethical imperatives and insights that derive from the new cosmological theory articulated in the book:

• First, that humankind is ethically obliged to safeguard the welfare of future generations.

• Second, that a spirit of species-neutral altruism should inform our interactions with other living creatures and with the environment we share.

• Third, that we and other living creatures throughout the cosmos are part of a vast, still undiscovered transterrestrial community of lives and intelligences spread across billions of galaxies and countless parsecs who are collectively engaged in a portentous mission of truly cosmic importance. Under the BIOCOSM vision, we share a common fate with that community—to help shape the future of the universe and transform it from a collection of lifeless atoms into a vast, transcendent mind.

• The inescapable implication of the Selfish Biocosm hypothesis is that the immense saga of biological evolution on Earth is one tiny chapter in an ageless tale of the struggle of the creative force of life against the disintegrative acid of entropy, of emergent order against encroaching chaos, and ultimately of the heroic power of mind against the brute intransigence of lifeless matter. Through the quality and character of our contribution to the progress of life and intelligence in this epic struggle, we shape not only our own lives and those of our immediate progeny but the lives and minds of every generation of living creatures down to the end of time. We thereby help to shape the ultimate fate of the cosmos itself.

Does it not also fail explain how the first universe to be amenable to intelligent life came into existence?

Consciousness is thus a sequence of discrete events, arising from alternating phases of 1) isolated quantum coherent superposition (in which microtubule quantum states are isolated by actin gelation), and 2) classical input/output in which microtubule information communicates with the non-conscious portions of the brain, nervous system and outside world. The alternating phases correspond with brain neurophysiology, e.g. the well known "40 Hz" gamma EEG oscillations.

We account for feelings and conscious experience by philosophical pan-protopsychism in which the components of conscious experience are irreducible, fundamental entities embedded in the Planck scale of fundamental spacetime geometry. Our proposal is consistent with the philosophy of A. N. Whitehead who proposed that consciousness was a sequence of "occasions of experience" occurring in a "basic field of proto-conscious experience".

Thus the infinitesimally tiny Planck scale, described by loop quantum gravity, string theory, quantum foam etc., is the authentic Matrix whose configurations give rise to conscious experience (and everything else).

The vast majority of brain activity is non-conscious; consciousness is the "tip of an iceberg". However no specific brain regions houses consciousness. Neurons may be non-conscious at one moment, and support conscious activities at the next. The transition, we propose, is Orch OR. This implies that pre-conscious activities including Freud's subconscious and our dreams are manifest as quantum information, e.g. as schizophrenic superpositions of multiple possibilities. The bizarre nature of the dream world has been described (Matte Blanco, 1971) as "where paradox reigns and opposites merge to sameness", also an apt description of the quantum world.

Thus we see consciousness is a self-organizing process on the edge between the quantum world and the classical world, and a connection between biological systems and the fundamental level of the universe. Orch OR is consistent not only with neurobiology and physics, but with spiritual traditions such as Buddhism, Hinduism and Kabbalah.

Quantum entanglement is ubiquitous in the microscopic world and manifests itself
macroscopically under some circumstances1, 2. But common belief is that it alone
cannot be used to transmit information3 nor could it be used to produce
macroscopic non-local effects. Yet we have recently found evidence of non-local
effects of chemical substances on the brain produced through it.

I hope that the skeptics on board can appreciate that its published by

There is evidently a deep mystery in how the brain produces self-awareness, I don't doubt that.