Water Coherence: The Medium Is the Message

Submitted by Walter Silva

An investigation into water's role as a quantum-coherent information substrate in biological systems, and a simple experiment to test it.

What is this thing?

Photosynthesis is the most efficient energy transfer process we've ever measured. When a photon hits a leaf, the energy finds its way to the reaction center through a chain of molecules with near-perfect efficiency — approaching 100%. The process requires quantum coherence: the energy travels all possible paths simultaneously and selects the optimal one. Gregory Engel's team confirmed this experimentally in 2007, and it's been replicated since.

Quantum coherence is very fragile — to achieve in controlled settings we require temperatures near absolute zero, the slightest thermal noise destroys coherent states. Laboratories spend billions engineering isolation from exactly the kind of environment a leaf sits in: warm, wet, vibrating, chemically noisy.  Our best photovoltaic cells achieve about 25% efficiency, leaves do nearly four times better under conditions our best engineering can't replicate, in the rain.

Now a second mystery, from a completely different field. Your eyes, ears, skin, nose, and tongue deliver approximately 11 million bits of information to your brain every second, your conscious experience handles about 50. That's a compression ratio of 220,000 to 1 — every second, continuously, your entire waking life. Neuroscience can trace individual signals along axons and across synapses, we understand the wiring, and the wiring describes how individual signals travel from point A to point B. The open question — called the binding problem — is how the brain integrates all of it into one unified experience at that compression ratio. Signals arrive from different senses at different speeds, get processed in different brain regions on different timescales, and somehow combine into a single coherent moment of awareness. This has been open for decades.

Two unsolved problems from different fields, same underlying question: how is biological matter maintaining coherent information integration under conditions our best engineering can't replicate?

Every biological system that does this shares one medium: water. And recently, we started finding out why that might matter — proton tunneling through water has been directly observed and measured. Protons hop through water molecule chains in 1-2 femtoseconds, confirmed by Yale's Mark Johnson team after 200 years of the Grotthuss mechanism being only a theory. This is real, measured, published physics — and it opens the door to water functioning as a coherent information transfer medium at biological temperatures.

This project investigates that door.

What's already in place

Proton tunneling in water is at the center of a surprising number of breakthroughs happening right now across fields that aren't talking to each other:

• Yale directly observed proton hopping through water at femtosecond timescales — the first direct measurement of a mechanism theorized for two centuries
• Oak Ridge National Lab is exploiting proton tunneling to collapse cancer cells' mitochondria — cells die within 30 minutes of irradiation through proton-coupled electron transfer
• Fuel cell engineers discovered proton tunneling between sulfonate groups in hydrated membranes is a major conduction mechanism — new polymer membranes are hitting 260 mS/cm conductivity, far above previous state of the art
• A Singapore team built synthetic molecular straws driven by proton gradients — 40x lighter than natural aquaporins, pointing toward desalination powered by tiny proton concentration differences instead of massive pressure systems
• Gerald Pollack's exclusion zone research shows water at biological interfaces forming structured layers with measurably different properties from bulk water — a fourth phase of water with distinct electromagnetic behavior
• Gregory Engel's team measured quantum coherence in photosynthesis at room temperature in 2007 — the original finding that proved biology already solved what our quantum computers can't
• Penrose and Hameroff's quantum consciousness hypothesis — that consciousness requires quantum coherence in microtubules — has survived decades of criticism but never identified the mechanism for how coherence persists at body temperature. Microtubules are hollow tubes filled with water. If water itself maintains coherence, the microtubules are the waveguide, and proton tunneling is the information transfer mechanism. This has never been proposed.

Cancer therapy, clean energy, water purification, neuroscience, consciousness research — all converging on water doing something fundamental, all publishing in separate journals, nobody connecting the dots.

Designing a simple experiment

Soap bubbles display interference patterns — coherent optical structures maintained across a thin water membrane. The entire film holds a global coherent state visible as those shimmering color bands.

If you perturb a soap film at one point, two things propagate: the physical wave through the medium, and any restructuring of the global interference pattern. If the pattern restructures faster than the mechanical wave reaches the other side of the film, you've measured coherent information transfer exceeding the propagation speed of the physical medium.

Cheap, testable, visually dramatic, requires no one to accept anything about consciousness, quantum theory, or biology — just measure two speeds in a water film. This of course might not be enough, but it's the initial question we are trying to answer.

If we get a positive result from this, making the perturbation controlled and measurable would be a huge breakthrough already. 

What happens in the next 1-3 months

Get collaborators from the scattered fields in the same conversation. From there:

• Run the soap film experiment or connect with someone who has the optical equipment to do it properly
• Compile the existing research threads into a single synthesis document — right now these findings are buried across separate journals and nobody sees the full picture
• Connect Pollack's EZ water work to Levin's bioelectric cognition group — Levin studies how cells coordinate through voltage patterns in aqueous media, and the connection to structured water hasn't been made
• Connect Penrose-Hameroff proponents with proton tunneling research — they've been looking for their mechanism and it might already be measured
• Start formalizing the information theory framing: what does water coherence mean for biological computation, and what specific predictions does it generate?

How we'll know if it worked

The soap film experiment gives a clear binary — either coherent information in a water membrane propagates faster than the mechanical wave, or it doesn't. If it does, that's publishable on its own and opens the door for everything else.

Beyond that: researchers from disconnected fields start citing each other. Quantum biology starts engaging with structured water research. Consciousness researchers engage with proton tunneling dynamics. Someone designs a sharper follow-up experiment. The conversation shifts from scattered observations to a unified research program.

Longest term, if the mechanism is real: room-temperature quantum computing, biological computing architectures, and energy systems approaching the efficiency that leaves already achieve.

What I need

• Collaborators in quantum biology, biophysics, water science, information theory, bioelectricity — curious people who want to explore this space
• Help designing and running experiments, starting simple with the soap film and extending toward biological water systems
• People who can spread connections between these scattered research groups — this is as much a distribution problem as a research problem
• Access to optical measurement equipment, and eventually labs working with biological water interfaces
• Money is useful but  it heavily depends on how the collaboration and experimental design develop first

Who's already adjacent / whose attention would help

• Gerald Pollack — exclusion zone water, the most direct empirical foundation, although some of his claims did't hold up and he was involved in some sketchy practices, he was one of the pioneers to notice the phenomena.
• Michael Levin — bioelectric cognition, cellular coordination in aqueous media, still not investigating water's role in information transfer through the EM field.
• Stuart Hameroff — quantum consciousness, looking for how coherence survives biological temperatures
• Gregory Engel — room-temperature quantum coherence in photosynthesis
• Mark Johnson (Yale) — first direct observation of the Grotthuss mechanism in water

Anyone working in quantum biology,. anyone at ORI interested in information theory as connective tissue. anyone curious to find how biology solved room-temperature quantum coherence three billion years ago.

I like this idea a lot! Looks like something that will be unavoidable eventually

One thing I'd note about getting funding is that the current budget might scare away investors in its current form. While I do see how a project like this would cost that much and even more, some brackets with lower values and goals for an MVP and more detailed budgeting would make it more compelling, specially for smaller investors too (and since this is a social network it could be entirely funded by its first users)

Great pitch with a lot of potential use cases!

Very interesting project! Why NOT extending it to a form of social media depending on how it goes?

I've worked a lot on the theory behind stuff like this and have been waiting for this kind of tool

I agree with @extenebrisluceton on the thread about a free tier, this has social network dynamics and could be more widely spread for memetic trackings, business model could stay open for testing 

Also this is a related tool for etymology that might be useful!

https://deconstructor.app/

This was nearly almost the initial idea I had, how can I person change the world? Certain people do that all the time, so how to reach them? I'll include it more explicitly in the pitch, thanks!

I"m gonna answer them preliminarily and maybe add more detail later!

1 -To be fair the translation documents are more of a diplomatic step that repeatedly shows up, people want things translated into their language so they can understand and endorse it a lot of times, so this is more focused into the academic integration, but honestly depending on how things progress it gains less and less importance! >Personally< I wouldn't do it (which is why its included as to do, not done, but if necessity arrived haha)

2 - I agree with you for the most part, I think the main virtues are understanding and the capacity to bear responsibility for the consequences, the only issue is that I haven't found any other as reliable way to predict virtuous behavior other then this set of characteristics, and the responsibility that some of these decisions entail are bigger than that, some systems really cannot fail. Maybe it's not feasible to say every practitioner would be like that, but I think at least the bar should be there; I'm also not claiming I fill in all those requirement yet, but Its how the weight of responsibility feels for me. I also miss higher bars, in an environment where it gets increasingly lower in some places

3 - That is a logical question to me really, psychology is just the name of the science of the mind and human behavior; part of the reason this pitch sounds almost like a manifesto is because I feel what is perceived as psychology has lost its meaning (if it ever got a stable one). I've wanted to do something about the world, and if the problem is coordination than behavior is what must be changed, so the meaning comes before the name to me. It also feels like the right egregore to fill and integrate, most sciences are much older and with much more established paradigms, humanities and specially psychology are fields in need of much more maturing to catch up. Ideally we would reach religious and political leaders to bring awareness and problem solving, but I think the ethical and long-term way to do it is p2p propagation in this case, the heart of open memetics: simply because having a guy in a closed room telling our leaders whats right wouldn't change much about the current situation, and so everyone has a shot at participating. That being said, psychology indeed may be a personal bias and I'm open to other candidates, Im not sure where to position psychology then tho. Or if we should integrate this into another more fitting  field

Egregore or Systems Psychology

What is this thing?

Every psychology school in history started the same way: someone identified something that was making people sick and nobody was treating it. This is that, for collective entities. You don´t have to be a formal psychologist to contribute, Skinner and Freud weren't. Academic fields and knowledge belong to those who can apply it and solve problems in the world.

Every company, church, political party, and social movement is a living organism made of human "cells." These entities coordinate millions of people, shape behavior at civilizational scale, and while we have clinicians for the individual, we only have "theorists" for the group.

The knowledge exists, scattered across disciplines: sociologists analyze how groups form, anthropologists document how cultures persist, memetics tracks how ideas spread through populations, but all of them describe — none of them treat. How do you change the collective behavior? 

• If you paint narrowing lines on a road, every driver slows down instinctively without deciding to,  no need for a stop sign or any kind of speed limiter.
• In rooms with high ceilings, the human brain instinctively shifts toward abstract, relational, and creative thinking, the physical volume of the room acts as a "mood stabilizer" or a "stimulant" for the entire group simultaneously.
• If you place the fruit at the beginning of a cafeteria line, the entire group eats more fruit. If you place the desserts first, the group’s health metrics drop. The sequence of information determines the collective outcome and no one has to "believe" in healthy eating;
• In countries where organ donation is "Opt-Out" (default is yes), consent rates are over 90%. In "Opt-In" countries, they hover at 15%.

To change human behavior, you change what the collective perceives. Egregore Psychology or Systems Psychology is the clinical science of collective behavior, grounded in information theory, applied where human coordination actually happens — religion, politics, and education.

Why this is important

Psychology is failing. Diagnostic rates up 400% since the 1990s, ADHD up 800%,  treatment rates tripled and despite that mental suffering continues to climb. We got better at naming misery without reducing it,  and current practice increasingly trains people for learned helplessness at scale, teaching them to blame and rely on the system  rather than building the capacity to act on it.

The field is also far too narrow, psychology is treated as something that happens in a quiet room with two chairs, but behavioral shaping is happening at very distinct and much more massive layers: religion, politics, education

Most humans on Earth don't have access to a therapist, but they have access to a church. Religion tells people how to coordinate, how to grieve, how to raise children, how to live and already operated as applied psychology at civilizational scale before the word even existed. Psychology's formal response has been to dodge, reject, or pathologize all of it, a position Maslow — the man behind the hierarchy of needs — argued fiercely against.

Politics determines which behaviors get rewarded and which get punished for entire populations, like tax incentives shape family planning and drug policy shapes who gets treated and who gets imprisoned, education mandates shape how millions of children learn to think. Every piece of legislation is a behavioral intervention deployed.

Plus the field itself is failing to self-correct:

• 70% of published psychology studies can't be reproduced
• Average GPA rose from 2.52 to 3.1+ while rigor collapsed
• Research on controversial topics declined 40% since 2010

Why now

Computational neuroscience and fMRI now let us study information processing across scales — from neural circuits to social networks — with real data. Information theory provides a mathematical framework connecting individual cognition to collective dynamics, a shared language for what was fragmented across incompatible disciplines.

Consciousness is now a live debate across physics, computer science, philosophy, and biology — everyone is engaging with it except the field that should be leading the conversation. The definition of intelligence and consciousness has always belonged to psychologists and neuroscientists, it was their question to answer. The boundaries between computation and sentience blurs daily, machines pass every test we designed, and the people trained to understand minds seem absent from the table.

What's in place

• CBT tracks behavioral outcomes — whether people can act, not just how they feel — but treats language as transparent when the distortion lives in the language itself
• Psychoanalysis navigates language deeply but has no verification mechanism
• Behavioral economics maps decision-making at population scale
• Memetics studies how ideas replicate, mutate, and compete across networks
• Game theory proved mathematically that cooperation beats defection — and every surviving culture discovered the same thing independently
• Urban design already intervenes on collective perception, those painted road lines are deployed in cities worldwide
• Community organizers, religious leaders, and corporate consultants all practice applied collective psychology without calling it that
• Human Resources and coordination has been largely captured by economic interests and institutions
• Systems Psychology at a much lower scale, family and small organizations

We're missing a synthesis — one discipline that understands the human substrate and can work across all of these to effectively accomplish goals.

The foundation

The practice grounds psychology in information theory and computation. Information is physical, it has inherent structure, and the same dynamics governing individual cognition operate at every scale of organization — from cells to civilizations.

The core metric is agency: can this system define goals, coordinate action toward them, and verify whether it succeeded? This applies to a person, a company, a political movement, or a religious community without metaphorical stretching. A collective with agency can identify problems, organize a response, and check its work against reality.

Every collective entity already has representatives — a board meeting is already a clinical session. The practitioner does not need new methodology for interfacing with collective entities, more importantly is the training to read what's actually happening in those room and applying effective solutions.

What the practitioner looks like

This is the tricky part, because the requirements are heavy.

Why do you pay a psychologist for? To shape your behavior, your perception, your relationship to reality. When that works and can be replicated, it's one of the most powerful and dangerous things a person can do, and you can scale that: decisions up the hierarchy chain cascade and can cause millions of deaths, or save millions of lives. The bar taking these kind of decisions should be through the ceiling, and the people responsible under constant scrutiny.

A good parent doesn't lecture their child into health, they live it as the child imitates what they see and not what they're told. The person who tells others how to live, who tells systems how to manage everyone else's life, should live an exemplary life. The fat nutritionist undermines your trust, and it should — either he doesn't do what he's preaching you to, or he does and is not competent at it.

Psychology is a lot like music: you can know all the theory and play terribly. The instrument is yourself.

The printing press made Da Vinci possible — knowledge that already existed could finally reach one mind, and a new Renaissance followed. AI does the same thing today, making the breadth feasible again for the first time in centuries. This is the new Renaissance, and the practitioner is the new polymath.

The requirements:

• Social skills — reading people, reading rooms, navigating any social context
• Attention control — directing and sustaining focus on what's actually happening beneath what's being said
• Ego death — dropping your own frame when the situation demands a different perspective
• Physical discipline — a mind that can't regulate its own body has no business regulating others
• Contemplative practice — experienced in meditation or prayer, the inner instrument gets tuned before it tunes anything else
• Adaptability — able to change their own behavior when new information demands it
• Leadership and humility simultaneously — an overachiever who remains the most humble person in the room

This sounds idealistic, but every serious tradition coordinated behavior successfully  demanded the same convergence. Jesuit priests were scholars, diplomats, scientists, and practitioners simultaneously — physical discipline, contemplative depth, intellectual rigor, and real-world engagement were all requirements. Monastic traditions across every culture understood that the person who guides others must first master themselves, through actual practice and actual hardship, not through reading about it. The training should includes calibrated adversity and suffering, because muscles grow through damage, immune systems develop through exposure, and a practitioner who has never been broken cannot understand the people they serve. It's developmental science — adaptation requires challenge at the edge of capacity.

Maximally compassionate to others, least compassionate to themselves. The one who prescribes the medicine takes the highest dose.

Long term, this becomes the new standard — every human should learn the basics of their own system, emotional regulation, collective dynamics. The practitioner is the vanguard, trained intentionally in what previously only happened by accident.

What I need

• People who can understand and teach the theoretical basis — engaging with the information theory framework and translating it for practitioners
• Write the founding translation documents — connecting current psychological schools and treatments to the new paradigm, showing how CBT, psychoanalysis, behavioral, humanistic, and systems approaches each capture part of the picture and how the framework unifies them
• Elaborate and go through the training program — defining the skills, practices, and developmental requirements, then actually walking through it with real people

Freud started with a living room. The founding circle comes first.

What happens in the next 1–3 months

Get the founding circle together — people who can see this and want to build it. From there:

• Translate the information theory framework into mainstream psychology language and get it into journals or pre-prints, even if just to start the conversation
• Formalize the founding translation documents connecting existing schools to the new paradigm
• Design experiments that test collective agency as a clinical metric
• Start building credentials within academia so this has a seat at the table

How we'll know if it worked

Psychology starts talking about collective management as a legitimate clinical domain. Old internal debates — the wars between CBT and psychoanalysis, the replication crisis, the narrowness of individual-only treatment — start settling because there's a framework that accounts for what each school got right. More psychologists engaging directly with coordination structures: religious communities, political organizations, educational systems. And the simplest metric of all: collective outcomes actually improving somewhere because someone applied this.

Who's already adjacent / whose attention would help

• Stephen Hayes — created ACT, already moved away from diagnostic categories toward functional processes, has been explicitly calling for a unified framework in psychology
• Andrés Gómez Emilsson (QRI) — rigorous quantitative consciousness research, would understand the information theory grounding immediately
• Karl Friston — his free energy principle and active inference framework is the closest existing mathematical formalism to this, already applying active inference to collective behavior
• John Vervaeke — cognitive scientist working on the meaning crisis, bridging cognitive science into wisdom traditions, already talking about the failure of psychology to address meaning at scale
• Gregg Henriques — built UTOK (Unified Theory of Knowledge) specifically to solve psychology's fragmentation problem, either the closest natural ally or the most informative comparison point
• Iain McGilchrist — hemispheric brain theory, his whole argument is that institutional pathology follows from left-hemisphere dominance suppressing integration, different language, overlapping diagnosis

Anyone interested in memetics and with formal ties to academic institutions that could jumpstart this discussion and give visibility to the rising field.