Qubits, agnostics and the quantum computer of life

Apologies to those of you who were disappointed that my last blog post, 'Is religious belief rational?', didn't actually address the title question. Some of you may have noticed that I left out the agnostic position. It wasn't that I didn't think about it. At the time I was thinking that perhaps religious belief is a dimension with agnostics sitting somewhere in between the two extremes. Since then I've read an essay which mentions qubits. It set me thinking.

To explain a little, a computer uses binary logic - a 'bit' is a unit of information, either 0 or 1 (like a switch either off or on). A qubit has many more possible states: 0, 1, or anywhere in between simultaneously.

If we were looking for a way to represent belief as it is expressed in a population, that would fit the bill so much better than binary logic, don't you think?

I'm not sure how you pronounce qubits but I've been making it rhyme with cubits, the favoured unit of measurement for Noah's ark-construction efforts. Since scientists began mapping genomes, I've often thought that the biblical story of Noah's ark doesn't belong in the kind of reality generally ascribed to our historical notions, that it fits better in an alternative version of reality (or maybe our 'future'), with Noah being an organisation dedicated to preserving the genome of every living species on the planet by computer mapping so that the species can be recreated at whim.

But that's going off at a tangent. Back to the thread of this post: qubits, agnostics and the quantum computer of life.

I got to thinking about how each individual is an expression of ancestral genes on a physical level and an expression of thoughts/feelings/choices on a consciousness level. What if Douglas Adams wasn't so far out, and we are a quantum computer?

I suppose that still begs the question: who is at the keyboard?