Posted on 02/27/2005 12:55:27 PM PST by betty boop
Can the Monist View Explain “What Is Life?
by Alamo-Girl and betty boop
In this article we would like to address the soundness and adequacy of the monist view of reality which conceives of “all that there is” as ultimately reducible to the concept of “matter in its motions.” This view holds that there is no essential difference between living and non-living systems in nature since both ultimately are expressions of the workings of the physical laws and only the physical laws. This insight or expectation leads one to presume that the laws of physics and chemistry are entirely sufficient to explain how matter came one day to spontaneously generate Life and thus all evolving living systems. This hypothesis is called abiogenesis and, try as hard as many first-rate researchers have done thus far, the fact is it has never yet been scientifically demonstrated.
Darwin studiously avoided abiogenesis in his major works — hence the insistence on the forum that the “theory of evolution” does not include abiogenesis. Perhaps his avoidance of the issue was for political reasons, we don’t know. At any rate, Darwin was known for his speculations about a “warm little pond” though evidently he didn’t want it to be a part of his theory. http://www.evowiki.org/index.php/Abiogenesis.
And yet one readily gets the impression on following the forum debate that many, if not most, subscribers to Darwin’s theory suppose that abiogenesis did, in fact, occur in some far distant past. On this view, biological evolution takes its origin from an unvalidated event that is presumed to be wholly material in character. This materialist aspect is fully consonant with the Darwinian view; abiogenesis rounds out the cosmological view to include a “beginning,” the problem that Darwin sought to avoid.
Implicit in the monist theory is the expectation that the universe is causally closed. All causes are material causes, and what we see all around us is the present cumulative effect of a virtually infinite succession of random material events that have taken place from a virtually infinite past until now. Such causes arise only within the 3+1 dimensional “block” of space-time as we humans normally experience/conceive it.
Yet as Elitzur (1993) points out, “the most essential attribute of randomness is the absence of connection between the states of the system’s components.” Organization, by definition, means that the system’s parts are highly correlated. The converse of “organization” is “reducibility” or “separability.” Therefore, organization means non-separability, connectivity. A. Grandpierre points out that “biological organization is different from physical ordering that is accompanied by a decrease of entropy. While physical ordering (misleadingly called ‘self-organization,’ but its actual meaning is self-ordering) plays an important role in storing information, the dynamical process of government through information is a process with a quite different nature.”
And yet the monist view holds that “all that there is” is fundamentally reducible to material random events or accidents being fortuitously tamed or shaped by physical laws. Which is what you would expect if you think that only material, physical, tangible entities are real. And thus information processing in living systems is a subject that can never come up in the first place; for fundamentally it is an immaterial, intangible process.
And yet here’s the interesting situation that develops from the physicalist (i.e., monist) concept: The physical laws themselves are immaterial, non-physical, intangible entities. It is here that the monist view breaks down as a valid interpretation of nature on its own terms. You can’t at the same time say that physical matter is all that there is and then turn around and invoke an immaterial principle that conditions or determines material behavior without engaging in self-contradiction.
And what can we say about the physical laws themselves — the great laws of motion and thermodynamics? Assuming that they “tame matter” or cause it to behave in certain ways, and assuming that matter is more or less “dumb and blind” (and quite possibly “lazy!”), then the physical laws must possess an informative content. And there’s another very interesting thing about the physical laws: They are in the main all laws of conservation. It has been observed that the amount of information required for conservation of a system seems not to be high, at least in comparison with the amount of information needed for a system to organize itself, modify its behavior, develop, evolve. For matter, left to its own devices (e.g., blind, dumb, and lazy devices), will follow the principle of “least action.” To put this into perspective, Paul Davies (The Fifth Miracle, 1998) writes:
“The laws of physics … are algorithmically very simple; they contain relatively little information. Consequently they cannot on their own be responsible for creating informational macromolecules … life cannot be ‘written into’ the laws of physics…. Life works its magic not by bowing to the directionality of chemistry, but by circumventing what is chemically and thermodynamically ‘natural.’ Of course, organisms must comply with the laws of physics and chemistry, but these laws are only incidental to biology.”
For the above reasons, the present writers remain skeptical about claims issuing from the monist position with regard to the fundamental origin and nature of life in the Universe. There is a need to account for, not only the fact that life cannot be exhaustively explained in terms of what is “chemically and thermodynamically ‘natural’”; but even more importantly, that life seems to work to counter the outcomes predicted by the physical laws.
Of particular interest is the possible relation of entropy and information in living systems. By information we mean the successful communication of a message (or “informative text”) such as to cause a “reduction of uncertainty in the receiver,” as formulated in terms of Shannon information theory. Note that “reduction of uncertainty in the receiver” issues as an actual event by virtue of a “decision” made and thus is analogous to state vector collapse in quantum microsystems, and to realized intended outcomes of sentient beings in “real-world” macrosystems. In all three cases, it appears that the probability amplitude is collapsed into just one “choice,” and all other possibilities vanish into a netherworld of unrealized (at that moment at least) potentialities. In all three cases, we seem to be looking at instances of very frank “quantizations” of “the continuum.”
Thus the thought occurs to one: Perhaps it is the ubiquitous presence of “observers” making “informed” choices which constitutes the irreversible “arrow of time” of the second law of thermodynamics. For “observations” lead to events (decisions) which, in the 3+1D block, constitute a successive temporal sequence of newly produced causes or, more to the point, a history (which can be thought of as evolution in retrospect). And history — like memory — is an irreversible process.
Alternatively, in the Feynman/Everett multi-world models, history may be a sum of histories (the cat is both alive and dead). In the second case the apparent thermodynamic entropy on our particular worldline as observer (the phenomenon which suggests an arrow of time) — is only one selection — though for our worldline that path or arrow of time would likewise seem irreversible. Whether or not it is actually irreversible and whether the arrow of time itself points in one direction only depends on whether there is another temporal dimension (f-Theory, Vafa). We need to mention that we recognize the significance of other multi-world and extra temporal dimension models as competing cosmological views. A fuller treatment of this subject is beyond the scope of the present article.
Now it is controversial that thermodynamics can have anything at all to do with the propagation and transmission of information. Indeed, it is reasonable to draw the negative conclusion, provided that one’s thermodynamical model is the one espoused by Boltzmann, whose hypothesis was that the second law is a law of disorder, of chaos. That hypothesis alone would appear to make thermodynamics a problematical construct for systems that are complex and self-organizing, such as living systems seem to be. And yet living systems are ineluctibly microstates within the global macrostate so well described by the second law of thermodynamics. This problem has been well noted.
Yockey, for instance (in Information Theory and Molecular Biology, 1992), presented a mathematical proof that Shannon entropy and thermodynamic entropy are functions of probability spaces that are not isomorphic. From this mathematical fact, he draws the conclusion that these two entropies have “nothing whatever to do” with each other:
“The function for entropy in both classical statistical mechanics and the von Neumann entropy of quantum statistical mechanics has the dimensions of the Boltzmann constant k and has to do with energy and momentum, not information.”
But what if the sine qua non hallmark or signature of living organisms is that they work by converting thermodynamic entropy into Shannon entropy? This would mean that although the two entropies belong to non-isomorphic probability spaces, living organisms preeminently possess a mechanism to bring the two probability spaces into direct relations. Indeed, that may be the entire point about what it is that constitutes the difference between a living and non-living system.
This is the problem that Hungarian astrophysicist A. Grandpierre tackles straight on in a forthcoming work. It is perhaps surprising that an astrophysicist would veer into biology. It turns out that his researches into the nature of the Sun suggested that astral bodies are self-organizing systems that actively work against the setting up of thermodynamic equilibrium that would otherwise obtain given initial and boundary conditions. In other words, the Sun is not a “hot ball of gas.” And so the resemblance of the Sun’s observed behavior to anything that we normally perceive as “biological behavior” struck him as an interesting problem.
As for the criteria of “biological behavior” to be applied, Grandpierre primarily draws on Ervin Bauer, a Hungarian theoretical biologist and physicist active during the first part of the 20th century, largely under Soviet auspices. Bauer is little known today. (His work, Theoretical Biology [1935], was published only in German and Russian and, we gather, is out of print anyway.) But we think he will make a come-back. For as far as we know, it was Ervin Bauer who first drew thermodynamics into explicit connection with biological theory, and Grandpierre highly values his insights:
“Living organisms do not tend towards the physical equilibrium related to their initial and boundary conditions, but [at all times] act in order to preserve their distances from the deathly physical equilibrium” predicted by the second law.
This says that, unlike physical systems, living systems move in just the opposite direction from that predicted by the second law: that is, living systems, for as long as possible, are devoted to evading or forestalling the eventual total loss of potential energies for the task of productive work, and thus ultimately “heat death.” But if living systems can counter the second law, then one must ask, how do they do that?
Grandpierre notes that “entropy is a somewhat subtle concept just because it connects two fundamentally different realms, of which only one is usually termed as ‘reality.’ Entropy connects the realms of possibilities with the world of manifested phenomena. If one would guess that possibilities do not exist since they do not belong to the phenomenal world, this would be conceptually confusing at the proper understanding of physical world. The central role of entropy is one of the most fundamental laws of Nature; the second law of thermodynamics tells that possibilities do belong to reality — and determine the direction of development of physical systems.”
“Realizing the possibilities” appears to depend on information. And so,
“[First we must] quantify some biologically fundamental aspects of entropy, information, order, and biological organization. Thermodynamic entropy, S and the entropic distance of the human body from its physical equilibrium at constant internal energy [must be] determined quantitatively, together with the number of microstates related to physical, chemical, and biological macrostates.
“We distinguish between physically and biologically possible states. In physical objects internal energy is redistributed by dissipative processes. In living organisms the Gibbs free energy, G is also redistributed, but not only in the individual degrees of freedom, but also by means of the consecutively coupling action of biological organization, which works on the whole set of all possible collective degrees of freedom.”
From the “here determined quantities [that] shed light on the source of biological information….our calculations show that the relatively high value of S [entropy] enhances the ability of living matter to represent information.”
And thus, by “determining the average information flow of a cell in the human body, and determining the enthalpy of a DNA molecule, we can draw quantitative consequences with regard to the static and dynamic information content of DNA. We estimated that the information necessary to govern the >105 chemical reactions sec–1 cell–1 in the 6*1013 human cells requires >1019 bits sec–1 that cannot be supplied from the static sequential information content of DNA ~109 bits for more than 10–10 sec. Physical self-ordering and biological self-organization represent opposite yet complementary tendencies that together cooperate to serve optimal balance. All these results together show that the source of biological information is ultimately to be found in the Bauer principle, in the same manner as the source of physical information is to be found in the [least-]action principle of physics.”
Elsewhere Grandpierre refers to the Bauer principle as the “life principle.” This has been alternatively termed as the fecundity principle (Swenson), or “the will to live.” It is customary to regard DNA as the information source that drives living systems. But having estimated the gigantic information flow present in the human body, and comparing that with the static information content of DNA, Grandpierre realized that there is something like a 20-orders of magnitude deficit in DNA information as compared with this number. We point out that DNA is the same in every cell of the body; and yet different cells are undergoing all kinds of different reactions, are involving themselves in collective modes (formation of macromolecules, organs, etc.) constantly. Obviously, the relatively low information content of DNA cannot explain the huge variety of functions that are taking place in the human body at every instant of time. Another interesting fact is that an organism’s DNA is exactly the same in a living cell as it is in a dead one. Thus if anything, it appears that DNA primarily works at the level of “physically-possible systems” (which are those that are still operational after death occurs), and so does not appear to be the only or even the main factor in biological self-organization, self-maintenance, etc. In order to be effective in the governance of “biologically-possible systems,” DNA itself must have access to a dynamic information source in order to compensate for the deficit of its static information in terms of driving biological behaviors.
So, where does this dynamic information come from? We are usually criticized for introducing a “pink unicorn” at this stage of the argument, for we propose that biological information is carried by a universal field. And yet the existence of fields is uncontroversial in science. We know that there are particle fields, force fields (e.g., EM, gravitation fields), and the reality of vacuum field is also uncontroversial. The main point about a field is its universal extent. Being universal, it is not an “ordinary” object of 3+1D spacetime. Rather, fields constitute matrices in which events happen, ultimately unifying all world processes into one integrated whole.
Fields apply universally to all points in space/time — every where and every when — thus they are neither time-restricted nor spatial coordinate restricted.
Grandpierre argues that, in addition to the other fields identified by science, there is also a “biofield” or an organic zero-point vacuum field that is the carrier of biological information. An analogy might help to explicate the theory. The Internet is a “universal” information field that can be accessed by anyone who has the proper equipment. There are often cases when communications are sent to us over the Internet. DNA stands for the particular “address” at which we can be successfully contacted; DNA is “smart enough” to be a router for incoming information addressed specifically to a particular receiver. And its presence as a router is necessary; otherwise, information being addressed to us would have no efficient way to reach us and, thus, to do us any good.
One might speculate that the physical laws, being also universal in extent and application, may similarly be field-carried phenomena in this sense.
In any case, when we speak of a “netherworld of yet-unrealized possibilities” occasioned by a re-imagined second law, are we not speaking of potentially real things that have to reside somewhere, because they represent states of potentiality that may become actualized? If this “netherworld” is of universal extent, then it would need a field to carry it.
In the space of a short article, we can only briefly touch on the arguments advanced by Dr. Grandpierre and his associates. If you have an interest in looking at his research, the Journal of Theoretical Biology may soon publish an article of his (working title: “Thermodynamic Entropy and Biological Information”) which richly details the merest sketch of certain key points given above, and a wealth of others besides.
Some feel insignificant when they look out at the night sky and see the Milky Way and think how small we are by comparison. Little do they know they are looking at only 1 part in 1050 of the whole deal. Insignificant followed by ten with 50 zeros. That is beyond awesomely insignificant. That is nearly beyond absurdly insignificant. Yet God notices us.
[RWP]: 'Evolution': the development or historical process of something…. Systems evolve as a result of the operation of physical laws. They start in one state; they evolve into others.
Thanks for clearing that up, Professor. From this I take it you did not mean to indicate that the physical laws themselves evolve. Instead you see them as the unchanging “constants” that constitute the basis by/on which all things in Nature change, especially including evolution. I readily agree with this understanding.
Vitalism (n) the philosophical doctrine that life processes possess a unique character radically different from physicochemical phenomena (both definitions from Am. Heritage Dictionary, College Ed., 1976.)… We teach in elementary chemistry that vitalism was disproven by Wohler in 1828….
It may be that Wohler disproved this theory. And yet I don’t think there is anything farfetched about the idea that life is not completely reducible to physicochemical phenomena. (Does that necessarily make me a “vitalist?”)
The reason I think that way is demonstrated in the following. For the sake of argument, let’s assume that the calculational results obtained for the average number of cells in the human body (1013) and the average number of cellular reactions per cell per second (105) are not totally out of whack. Next, let’s say that the physical laws are active on our body and influence the activity of our cells, acting to produce energy dissipation and increasing disorder. It has been observed that most of the chemical regulative reactions have a vital significance. Therefore, it seems they should necessarily and inevitably occur in a highly coherent way in order to fulfill the vital needs of the organism.
Thus, it seems that “the regulation of the physico-chemical processes cannot occur on the basis of physics and chemistry alone, since it is just the physico-chemical processes that have to be submitted to a higher regulative principle in order to reach macroscopic coherency. Moreover, it would be impossible to realize on a physical basis such a detailed regulation of reactions having a practically astronomical multitude. For a physical regulative factor to work, all the ~1018 reactions/sec of the cells would need to be observable simultaneously. The regulative mechanism should contain an additional information centre above the level of chemical reactions. To observe the reactions occurring, finding out what the next reactions should be and emitting the information to execute them needs a higher degree of complexity than the cellular reactions themselves. Therefore, the information content of biological regulation mechanism should be much higher than 1018 bits/s. The physical body may well be transparent for electromagnetic (EM) fields; and the behavior of the globally organizing EM fields seems to belong to the exclusive realm of physics.” [Grandpierre, private communication, 2004; italics added]
The information theorists do not disparage the sovereignty of the physico-chemical laws in their proper sphere. The argument seems to be about (1) whether there is something that needs to be “super-added” to the physico-chemical laws in order to explain Life; and if so, (2) what that something might be.
The problem was succinctly put by Cyrus Levinthal, who pointed out towards the end of the 1960s that “even for a small protein molecule, consisting of only 100 amino acids, each having four different possible positions in the protein molecule, the number of the possible configurations is around 1060. Assuming that this protein molecule wants to reach a different state, … it would need 1030 times the lifetime of the Universe if a physical mechanism were to play the role of ‘active information,’ oscillating with a frequency of 1013 Hz.” And yet as Grandpierre et al. point out, “it has been observed that protein molecules normally find other configurations within hours, sometimes within a millisecond. This contradiction is known as the Levinthal paradox. There is no known solution for this paradox,” citing Callender et al., 1994.
And so information theory hypothesizes that an organic system must effectively be under the control of a non-physical-chemical principle by means of “a profoundly informative intervention,” as Polanyi puts it. And assuming Levinthal’s analysis is correct, it seems unlikely that the source of this “profoundly informative intervention” can be found in “matter in its motions.”
So far, this line of reasoning does not seem beyond the pale to me. Of course, the insight that more than the physico-chemical laws are need for the emergence and sustenance of Life raises a whole lot of new questions. Should they not be asked at all?
Thank you so much for writing, Professor.
But no matter. What we really need is light. Could you be a little more helpful in this regard, going forward???
There may be a large number of possible configurations, but in water the is only one, or a couple that are the low energy state. Proteins fold and form "lumps" whose external surfaces provide a geometric arrangement of chemical binding sites for catalysis. They may also form regular chains, or coils, for such things as locomotion. The chains/coils are the stable configuration given the the rest of the chemical environment.
Cetology
I have my doubts about the "universal life field," BB, but I think you've got that "vital spark."
lolology
And how did these forms arise (e.g., geometry, chains, coils, and one imagines also such things as the Fibonnaci series, Mandelbrot set, cellular automaton #110, Aleph and its conjugates, etc.)?
Evidently you are describing forms, spunketts. From what/whence does form "emerge" in the Universe?
And we haven't even gotten into function yet, things like locomotion, etc....
Thanks, dear Patrick.
10100
* * * * *
Yet here we are. A hand dealt from a deck of 10100 cards at least.
What are the odds!
* * * *
Speaking from probabilities we know there are some degeneracies -- like partial symetries, disallowed states, imaging copying etc. -- but the evolutionary biologists have not jumped the shark and pulled any rabbit from their hats that would make a molehill of that super-super-Everest of a probability mountain.
Am I remembering correctly from Hawking's book that the universe will reach 10 to the 120th and thence be frozen?
The fundamentals are rather simple when veiwed in simple uncomplicated systems. Once those systems appear in interactions with one another things become more complicated. Life was built up from just such additions. Simple independent systems added and gained further complexity through mutaiton. All along the way there are stringent physical constraints and feedback mechanisms that limit what appears as regular parts of the system.
The idea of irreducible complexity doesn't apply to life, because the complex end systems used as examples never just popped into existence. They were built by merges of independent working systems and feedback constrained changes. These all occur as molecular actions and reactions. DNA for the most part, is not involved in active control. The multitude of reactions and interactions occur independently, with various forms of parallel feedback as regulation.
" And how did these forms arise (e.g., geometry, chains, coils, and one imagines also such things as the Fibonnaci series, Mandelbrot set, cellular automaton #110, Aleph and its conjugates, etc.)? Evidently you are describing forms, spunketts. From what/whence does form "emerge" in the Universe? And we haven't even gotten into function yet, things like locomotion, etc...."
The forms arise, because they assume the stable configuration for that environment. If the form arises during assembly, it's the properties of the template/solution, ect that determine it.
Each of those items in the e.g. you menitoned are mathematical abstractions. If those forms appear in reality, it's because of the properties of the components assembling to make the form. If you look at something like methane, it has that form and arrangement, because carbon's S orbital and 3P orbitals mix to form a resulting orbital that allows an octet of electrons to surround it. That octet is the lowest energy configuration available, so that's the form that appears. The atoms arrange themselves at a particular distance and at the apexes of a tetrahedron, because that's the locations where the 4 pairs in the octet result in the lowest E configuration.
At the room temperature scale these visible forms are all due to electrostatic forces. I'll ignore gravity which tends to flatten things, or round them out. The forms all occur, because that is the lowest energy configuration, or the configuration they were assembled in by a process that moved to a lower energy configuration. If you play with magnets the lowest energy configuration is when opposite poles touch. All other close, but not touching placements are higher energy and you can feel that.
With atoms hte electrostatic attraction would result in collapse and annihilation of electrons with part of the nucleus if other processes did not occur in the bound state. In a bound state both increased separation and decreased separation of charges result in higher energy. The charges end up floating with zero net force between them at a certain distance.
Feynman's treatment in QED for the hydrogen atom gives a complete consideration of all the processes involved in a bound state. The form of atomic and molecular assemblies is the result of assembly into, or being assembled by processes moving to lower energy states.
with life, only those forms that provide useful function are kept, because of feedback mechanisms. The form and action of the mechanisms of life depend on feedback, which is electrostatic no matter what entities are involved. Trees grow higher for more light, because that part of the plant which recieves the most light grows. If more light comes to the side of the tree, that region will grow faster than all the others. If the cell walls in the branches and trunk are stressed from wind, gravity, or overgroth on a side, that strain induced by the stress will cause increased growth to releive it. If muscle mass increases, protein messangers will cause vascularization and innervation that otherwise would not occur.
Locomotion leads to positive feedback. Someone posted a bluprint of flagella motor here on FR recently. It's many years old by now. There's a biochem book that I found very informative that makes it easier to understand and visualize the physical processes of life. Ignore the political opinion in there. LOL.
At the heart of the origin-of-life problem lies a fundamental question: What is it that we are trying to explain the origin of?Well, we know a basic requirement for life is putting things together at the right time and in the right sequence. Though this can be applied to the universe and abiogenesis – this obviously applies to an organism as a whole. IOW, what makes a nose a nose if no one knows the nose is supposed to be a nose --- DNA? DNA just takes us back to the molecular level.
- Harmke Kamminga
I realize that I am toying with resonance synonymous hyperbole in birth, but the nose cell knows to become a nose and science reeks of materialism in its explanation. To say things have evolved as thus and have become different does nothing to explain the knowledge of a nose cell which became part of a nose rather than a toe (though the feet can smell and the nose can run). What is constructing the ‘processes’ for the nose as opposed to the toes? Is this as obvious as something in front of your face or is this something that must be cut off in spite… For DNA to say “You go on this side and you go on that side. You become this and you become that…” Cannot be intelligent design or beauty – it is all in the molecules without purpose, plan, or ultimate structure?
Ah, and we must be sure to keep teleology out of this equation because design would ruin the current paradigm :
The foregoing remarks lead me to say a few words on the protest lately made by some naturalists against the utilitarian doctrine that every detail of structure has been produced for the good of its possessor. They believe that many structures have been created for the sake of beauty, to delight man or the Creator (but this latter point is beyond the scope of scientific discussion), or for the sake of mere variety, a view already discussed. Such doctrines, if true, would be absolutely fatal to my theory. I fully admit that many structures are now of no direct use to their possessors, and may never have been of any use to their progenitors; but this does not prove that they were formed solely for beauty or variety. No doubt the definite action of changed conditions, and the various causes of modifications, lately specified, have all produced an effect, probably a great effect, independently of any advantage thus gained. But a still more important consideration is that the chief part of the organisation of every living creature is due to inheritance; and consequently, though each being assuredly is well fitted for its place in nature, many structures have now no very close and direct relation to present habits of life.
Darwin
What's a negative vacuum field?
Already violating: "AG: Imputing motives is not helpful ... "?
So, what's your motive for supporiting ID? Do you feel a need for a Big Ponzi? I have found no one arguing against ID who fear the existence of such. Where is your evidence? Numbers on the table; back up your claims with evidence rather than imputations.
Oh my, bvw -- what a lapidary analysis! Thank you so very much!
So where does the template/solution come from?
Sorry spunketts, that's the best I can do for now cause I'm heading off to bed. Tomorrow is a workday. Will get back soon. Thanks for writing!
I'm also in and out. Night.
Heartlander, I'm just checking my messages prior to signing off so I can go to sleep, so will not be hanging around here very much longer. But I have to say just a teensy word re: the above before I go to bed.
The assumption that structure/(function) is produced for the more-or-less exclusive good of its possessor is an idea that seriously needs to be re-examined and put into proportion. For one thing, such a supposition flies in the face of the natural and historical records we have to date, which strongly suggest that cooperation is consummately valuable in achieving real outcomes in nature.
I'm looking forward to chatting again soon, dear Heartlander. For now, good night! (Sleep tight!)
snore..........snore.....snore......
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