It was shown that, while interpreting life as a physical phenomenon, fundamental physics allows for the following alternatives: relativity of animate and inanimate upon canonical transformations; the impossibility of the change from animate to inanimate state of isolated systems; the abandonment of attempts to reduce biology to the physics of isolated systems. The possibility of reducing biology to phenomenological physics was considered. A number of equations for the general phenomenological dynamics of density matrix was proposed.
It was shown that, while interpreting life as a physical phenomenon, fundamental physics allows for the following alternatives: relativity of animate and inanimate upon canonical transformations; the impossibility of the change from animate to inanimate state of isolated systems; the abandonment of attempts to reduce biology to the physics of isolated systems. The possibility of reducing biology to phenomenological physics was considered. A number of equations for the general phenomenological dynamics of density matrix was proposed.
In classical physics, the world is considered as a matter-based reality, the arrangement of whose parts in time is uniquely determined by certain dynamic laws. By contrast, modern quantum physics reveals that matter is not composed of matter, but reality is merely potentiality. The world has a holistic structure, which is based on fundamental relations and not material objects, admitting more open, indeterministic developments. In this more flexible causal framework, inanimate and animate matter are not to be considered as fundamentally different but as different order structures of the same immaterial entity. In a stable configuration, effectively all the uncertainties are statistically averaged out, thus the unique and deterministic behavior of ordinary inanimate matter is exhibited; whereas in the case of statically unstable but dynamically stable configurations, the “lively” features of the underlying quantum structure have a chance to surface to the mesocopic level and to be connected with what we observe as the phenomenon of life. This supposition can be more explicitly treated and clarified by identifying the electric dipole moment of biomolecules as the ordering parameter of the corresponding macroquantum system. This has important consequences for biology and medicine. In particular, it suggests the existence of a quantum-based “software,” essential perhaps for the logistics of biological processes, which are hidden behind the matter/energy-based “hardware” that alone is considered in the conventional approach. In medicine it opens an opportunity to build bridges between conventional medicine based essentially on the classical paradigm, and the various forms of complementary medicine, which have strong affinities with the new features of the modern holistic worldview.
In his famous book, “What is life?”, Erwin Schrödinger defines biological processes as processes that decrease entropy. As accurate as this description is, entropy reduction is not unique to animate processes; therefore, this definition does not clearly distinguish between animate and inanimate processes. Relying on previous works, which showed that in quantum-like processes the collapse resulting from measurements defines the concept of an observer’s personal interpretation, we present life as a comprehensive quantum-like measurement process that interprets reality. Furthermore, we show that this process decreases entropy, in agreement with Schrödinger’s definition.
Quantum physics and biology have long been regarded as unrelated disciplines, describing nature at the inanimate microlevel on the one hand and living species on the other hand. Over the past decades the life sciences have succeeded in providing ever more and refined explanations of macroscopic phenomena that were based on an improved understanding of molecular structures and mechanisms. Simultaneously, quantum physics, originally rooted in a world-view of quantum coherences, entanglement, and other nonclassical effects, has been heading toward systems of increasing complexity. The present perspective article shall serve as a "pedestrian guide" to the growing interconnections between the two fields. We recapitulate the generic and sometimes unintuitive characteristics of quantum physics and point to a number of applications in the life sciences. We discuss our criteria for a future "quantum biology," its current status, recent experimental progress, and also the restrictions that nature imposes on bold extrapolations of quantum theory to macroscopic phenomena.
A suggestion of Bohr's to the effect that numerous situations exist among the life sciences and the social sciences which exhibit characteristics of complementarity strikingly parallel to those of quantum physics is developed further in this paper. The supposition is advanced that there may exist for biological systems inherent relations of indeterminacy between sets of observable properties of such systems analogous to the Heisenberg indeterminacy relations between canonically conjugate pairs of observables in quantum mechanics. The existence of such indeterminacies would be manifested, as it is in physical systems, in disturbances, uncontrollable in principle, produced when such systems interact with instruments and apparatus used to gain information about them. The fact that radical disturbances, whether incidental or inherent, accompany the process of observation in the life sciences is, of course, quite obvious. If a well-defined portion of such disturbances should turn out to be inherent, indeterminacy and probability would be introduced into biological phenomena as basic elements. Further progress in scientific explanation and synthesis of knowledge in these fields would then require a redefinition of the state of a biological system analogous to the necessity for using quantum ψ-functions for specifying the state of a physical system with the attendant possibility of wholly new insights, such as those in physics which ultimately depend on the symmetry properties of ψ-functions. This new, and presently unknown, scheme for specifying the state of biological systems would then presumably result in the typically complementary aspects of phenomena in these fields to which Bohr has called attention. A number of familiar examples of apparently complementary phenomena among the biological and social sciences are described, and the possibility that they may arise from inherent indeterminacies basic to the systems which exhibit these phenomena is considered. It is concluded that these considerations lead to the expectation that an approach along such lines in future investigations in the life sciences holds considerable promise, and that the physics teacher is in a unique position to assist in stimulating such an approach and in pointing out by analogy the means at each stage which are likely to prove best suited for carrying it through.
The main aspects connected with the many-worlds interpretation of quantum theory are discussed in the article. A possible relation of the interpretation with fundamental biological problems is emphasized. The context of the many-worlds interpretation is discussed in the frames of the so-called “wave function reduction” problem. Thus, some difficulties that arise when we try to imagine how a wave function is reduced in the many-worlds interpretation, are focused on. It is shown that explanations suggested by now as to how the “wave function reduction” happens cannot claim to be the final answer to this question, even though they are not formally contradictory.
The file on this site provides the slides for a lecture given in Hangzhou in May 2018, and the lecture itself is available at the URL beginning 'sms' in the set of links provided in connection with this item. It is commonly assumed that regular physics underpins biology. Here it is proposed, in a synthesis of ideas by various authors, that in reality structures and mechanisms of a biological character underpin the world studied by physicists, in principle supplying detail in the domain that according to regular physics is of an indeterminate character. In regular physics mathematical equations are primary, but this constraint leads to problems with reconciling theory and reality. Biology on the other hand typically does not characterise nature in quantitative terms, instead investigating in detail important complex interrelationships between parts, leading to an understanding of the systems concerned that is in some respects beyond that which prevails in regular physics. It makes contact with quantum physics in various ways, for example in that both involve interactions between observer and observed, an insight that explains what is special about processes involving observation, justifying in the quantum physics context the replacement of the unphysical many-worlds picture by one involving collapse. The link with biology furthermore clarifies Wheeler’s suggestion that a multiplicity of observations can lead to the ‘fabrication of form’, including the insight that this process depends on very specific ‘structures with power’ related to the 'semiotic scaffolding' of the application of sign theory to biology known as biosemiotics. The observer-observed 'circle' of Wheeler and Yardley is a special case of a more general phenomenon, oppositional dynamics, related to the 'intra-action' of Barad's Agential Realism, involving cooperating systems such as mind and matter, abstract and concrete, observer and observed, that preserve their identities while interacting with one another in such a way as to act as a unit. A third system may also be involved, the mediating system of Peirce linking the two together. Such a situation of changing connections and separations may plausibly lead in the future to an understanding of how complex systems are able to evolve to produce 'life, the universe and everything'. (Added 1 July 2018) The general structure proposed here as an alternative to a mathematics-based physics can be usefully characterised by relating it to different disciplines and the specialised concepts utilised therein. In theoretical physics, the test for the correctness of a theory typically involves numerical predictions, corresponding to which theories are expressed in terms of equations, that is to say assertions that two quantities have identical values. Equations have a lesser significance in biology which typically talks in terms of functional mechanisms, dependent for example on details of chemistry and concepts such as genes, natural selection, signals and geometrical or topologically motivated concepts such as the interconnections between systems and the unfolding of DNA. Biosemiotics adds to this the concept of signs and their interpretation, implying novel concepts such as semiotic scaffolding and the semiosphere, code duality, and appreciation of the different types of signs, including symbols and their capacity for abstraction and use in language systems. Circular Theory adds to this picture, as do the ideas of Barad, considerations such as the idea of oppositional dynamics. The proposals in this lecture can be regarded as the idea that concepts such as those deriving from biosemiotics have more general applicability than just conventional biology and may apply, in some circumstances, to nonlinear systems generally, including the domain new to science hypothesised to underlie the phenomena of present-day physics. The task then has to be to restore the mathematical aspect presumed, in this picture, not to be fundamental as it is in conventional theory. Deacon has invoked a complex sequence of evolutionary steps to account for the emergence over time of human language systems, and correspondingly mathematical behaviour can be subsumed under the general evolutionary mechanisms of biosemiotics (cf. also the proposals of Davis and Hersh regarding the nature of mathematics), so that the mathematical behaviour of physical systems is consistent with the proposed scheme. In conclusion, it is suggested that theoretical physicists should cease expecting to find some universal mathematical ‘theory of everything’, and focus instead on understanding in more detail complex systems exhibiting behaviour of a biological character, extending existing understanding. This may in time provide a more fruitful understanding of the natural world than does the regular approach. The essential concepts have an observational basis from both biology and the little-known discipline of cymatics (a discipline concerned with the remarkable patterns that specific waveforms can give rise to), while again computer simulations also offer promise in providing insight into the complex behaviours involved in the above proposals. References Jesper Hoffmeyer, Semiotic Scaffolding of Living Systems. Commens, a Digital Companion to C. S. Peirce (on Commens web site). Terrence Deacon, The Symbolic Species, W.W. Norton & Co. Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Duke University Press. Philip Davis and Reuben Hersh, The Mathematical Experience, Penguin. Ilexa Yardley, Circular Theory.