Is Life Fundamental? by Sara Imari Walker

Hello Ms Walker,

The number of cosmological spheres for example or an atom of H for example, see that this number is the same.Finte and precise, it permits to quantize the mass. The volumes of this entanglement are relevant when the central spheres,the singularities are the most important volumes. So the stabilities of evolution appears considering the polarization spherization between m and hv. The mass polarises this light in fact Ms Walker.

The spheres inside the sphere are the answer.

Best Regards

Dear Sara,

I've no doubt that life cannot completely be reduced to physical and chemical terms. There is something beyond of that. But it seems highly difficult to get in touch with this entity whatever it may be.

Some people are calling it consciousness, other mind etc.

In the past the scientific inquiry of this entity was simply a taboo, but now a paradigm shift is taken place and a purely materialist view of the universe including life does no longer dominate science.

A good example is the research of Dr. Pim van Lommel, a renowned cardiologist, who has studied in a systematic way near-death experiences (NDEs). As a cardiologist, he was struck by the number of his patients who claimed to have near-death experiences as a result of their heart attacks. As a scientist, this was difficult for him to accept: Wouldn't it be scientifically irresponsible of him to ignore the evidence of these stories? Faced with this dilemma, van Lommel decided to design a research study to investigate the phenomenon under the controlled environment of a cluster of hospitals with a medically trained staff. For more than twenty years van Lommel systematically studied such near-death experiences in a wide variety of hospital patients who survived a cardiac arrest. In 2001, he and his fellow researchers published his study on near-death experiences in the renowned medical journal The Lancet. The article caused an international sensation as it was the first scientifically rigorous study of this phenomenon.

His work proves that life is not restricted to a composed physical and chemical object like the body, but something different beyond space and time; something that can obviously be experienced separate from the body. Van Lommel himself has come to the conclusion that most likely the brain must have a facilitating and not a producing function to experience consciousness. By making a scientific case for consciousness as a nonlocal and thus ubiquitous phenomenon he has questioned a purely materialist paradigm in science.

Hence, your paper resp. your thesis is touching a serious topic of future science.

Good luck for your paper

Helmut

:) Oparine with a e Mr Walker.

I was fascinated by the expermiment creating amino acids with methan,amoniac,water,acetylen.....more E under different forms like hv or heat or acids bases or this or that,it is fascinating to see the amino acids appearing . Our evolution, biological, mineral...is fascinating.The mass increases and the complexification is incredible in its adaptation.It is there that the spherical volumes of the serie of uniqueness take all their universal meaning.

The spheres evolve in fact.

Best Regards

Thanks, Sara. Discussions I had with Dan Braha in 2007 convinced me that this result deserves more attention than it has gotten then or since. Translating bounded data sets into topological maps evolving in time suggests to me that much more lies beneath self-organizing phenomena than we have yet explored. Bar-Yam's theory of multi-scale variety (which he developed as a theorem from Ashby's law of requisite variety) is a very powerful tool for all kinds of systems function and analysis, whether biological or otherwise.

I strongly agree on the origin of life question. You're right that examples are lacking of "life" phenomena that aren't " ... biological or derivative of biological organization ..." though my penchant for pushing boundaries and barriers tells me that a general definition of "organization" -- as order with feedback -- applies both top down and bottom up.

Best,

Tom

Hi Sara, I read your essay with great interest. You've done a fantastic job challenging an assumption that reductionists would likely consider untouchable. I was delighted that you stressed the role of information, and particularly information-in-context -- this is the focus of my essay "Toward an Informational Mechanics", and I would love to get your thoughts on it.

The main assumption I challenge is that information is underlain by objects. I argue that matter and spacetime may emerge out of information content, which can only arise in the relational context of other information. This is where the possible fundamental nature of life comes in: If we consider living organisms (and their technology) to be complex fundamentally informational systems, whose complexity has evolved in the context of other evolving informational complexity, then informational complexity *in the universe* may be a function of the informational complexity of the observer -- the biological or technological system doing the observing. I suspect that this or some other purely relational picture is what's keeping us from seeing the big picture, and how life fits into it.

A purely chemical conception of life is deeply problematic, as you point out so clearly; but I go further by hypothesizing that the chemistry itself emerges from information-in-context (which may be where I lost some readers!).

Thanks for the great read and best of luck.

Heaven Breasts and Heaven Calculus

http://vixra.org/abs/1209.0072

Since the birth of mankind, human beings have been looking for the origin of life. The fact that human history is the history of warfare and cannibalism proves that humans have not identified their origin. Humanity is still in the dark phase of lower animals. Humans can see the phenomenon of life only on Earth, and humans' vision does not exceed the one of lower animals. However, it is a fact that human beings have inherited the most advanced gene of life. Humans should be able to answer the following questions: Is the Universe hierarchical? What is Heaven? Is Heaven the origin of life? Is Heaven a higher order of life? For more than a decade, I have done an in-depth study on barred galaxy structure. Today (September 17, 2012) I suddenly discovered that the characteristic structure of barred spiral galaxies resembles the breasts of human female essentially. If the rational structure conjecture presented in the article is proved then Sun must be a mirror of the universe, and mankind is exactly the image on earth of the Heaven.

http://galaxyanatomy.com

Dear Sara Imari Walker

Your essay provided me a fresh reading on biology in a contest virtually devoted only to pure physical questions, including mine!

My own position on the main theme of your essay is somehow in the middle betwen the vitalist and the reductionist. This is what the Nobel winner Jean Marie Lehn calls integrationism: the integration of upper levels with lower levels.

Integrationism is at the very foundation of the observed hierarchical structure of matter and is the main paradigm used in supramolecular chemistry for the study of the frontier between living and non-living matter.

The answer to your question is "yes". A theory of life is so fundamental as general relativity or quantum field theory in their respective fields, because none of those (neither highly speculative approaches as superstring theory) can explain the rich phenomena observed in living systems. The limits of physics have been debated in the recent XXI Solvay Conference on Physics. The proceedings have been published in the volume 122 of Advances In Chemical Physics (2002).

You must find interesting the work "From Coupled Dynamical Systems To Biological Irreversibility" (pages 53-75 of the above volume) by Kunihiko Kaneko. You can find in part four, "Extension Of Quantum Theory And Field Theory", of the proceedings several works on generalizations of quantum field theory devoted to explain the fundamental irreversibilities observed in living systems. My own work must be considered a generalization of the dynamics of correlations developed by the Brussels-Austin School (pages 261-276).

Regards

Sara,

I read your essay quite a while ago. I found myself not able at first to respond particularly, because I have pondered much the same issue. My undergraduate specialization with physics was biophysics, and correspondingly I had biochemistry and molecular biology. I cloned genes and the whole thing. My doctoral work was with quantum fields and gravity though. This matter to me is huge open question, and frankly I have not the foggiest idea whether there something we might call the bio-state in the physical universe.

My sense of this issue is that it involves some extensive variables with a phase change. Extensive variables are not scale invariant. For instance pressure does not depend on scale, while the number of atoms or particles is dependent. In addition, if there is a bio-state it is not a phase of a system that exists in closed thermodynamics. It must necessarily be a property or phase that exists in open thermodynamic systems. These systems are similar to Prigogine's work. Further, a variable of importance is information. Information in biological systems has some parallels with algorithmic complexity. For instance the DNA --- > mRNA --- > polypeptide is a sort of Turing machine process. In fact the production of a polypeptide by reading the RNA is a sort of Chomsky lexical system. The polypeptide might then be a switching system, say a kinase that phosphorylates another polypeptide, which starts another process, which ... .

The complexity is that while maybe some local aspects of molecular biology are similar to information processing systems, these are all open and linked into huge webs of biochemical pathways. As such there is an extensive property to this information or complexity. Whether this can in some ways lead to a physical state or phase, the bio-state, is something that I think we have no idea about. It might be the case, and there is certainly a qualitative sense there is such a state, but as yet we have no theory or data.

Cheers LC

Hi Sara. I should have elaborated a little more on my position. Gravity involves vision, touch, and feeling. BOTH gravity and electromagnetism enjoin and balance visible and invisible space. With direct bodily experience being fundamental to physics, what do you think of the following in relation to your position/essay please?

Paul Davies says: "The ultimate source of biological information and order is gravitation." Now, what of this: Thought is integrated and interactive in and with the range of gravitational feeling that is experienced by the body, in comparison with the rest of this post, AND with this: BOTH gravity and electromagnetism enjoin and balance visible and invisible space. Do you see this as having bearing or relevancy in your work? I would add the following.

Gravity, invisible and visible (seen and felt), is fundamental to distance in/of space. Vision begins invisibly inside the eye/body because the space is also invisible at the very top of the head while waking/standing.We always start with typical/ordinary experience (such as dreams and waking/standing PHYSICAL experience) when establishing physical fundamentals/truth(s). Gravity is in an even/incremental range of [gravitational] feeling as we experience it (my essay covers this fully) because it goes from visible space to invisible space (while waking/standing).

Now, importantly, regarding gravity, we do consider touch, feeling, and vision together in relation thereto; especially because thought is integrated and interactive in and with the range of gravitational feeling that is experienced by the body -- a most important point. "The purpose of vision is to advise of the consequences of touch in time", per the philosopher Bishop Berekeley. This is important too.

Modern physics is basically lost and in divided fragments because direct bodily experience -- typical/ordinary experience (dreams and waking) -- (seen, felt, and touched considered TOGETHER) is fundamental to thought/theory and to physics (fundamentally and generally).

What do you think please Sara? Can you review and rate my essay please?

Dear Sara Imari Walker,

Big Bang nucleosynthesis is not expressional with this paradigm of Coherently-cyclic cluster-matter universe that describes the universe as eternal, in that the nucleus of a chemical element is described as a dense region of tetrahedral-branes within a domain that represents that element itself. In this paradigm, distribution of chemical elements in universe differs for the holarchial segments as per the gravitational potentials of these segments in that the nuclear transmutation and reverse transmutation of the elements are in correlation with the fluctuations of gravitational potentials of these holarchial segments.

Excessive energy in a holarchial segment that is not proportional with the gravitational potential of that segment is causal for the evolution of life in that specific holarchial segment that has favourable conditions. Increase of chemical potential by the evolution of organic compounds, sustains the continuous evolution of complex organic compounds in that holarchial segment, that have life and continues with the evolution of higher order of species in that segment. Thus the homeomorphic segmental-fluctuation cycle of the universe is imperative for the evolution and extinction of life in a specific holarchial segment, in that the physical causality of homeomorphic segmental-fluctuation is the collective effect of the entirety of universe.

With best wishes

Jayakar

Sarah

Wonderfully written and fascinating essay on an important subject poorly covered here. I also agree it's not 'either/or' between top down and bottom up causation but both. In Architecture the design process is certainly mainly top down but component relations are bottom up. Construction can of course be both (the 'Shard' was both at once!).

I find a multiple circle or dipole, commonly forming a torus, or when translating through space, interestingly not only derives the strong force (found in Vladimir Tamari's work) but also gives the form of DNA. Of course the spiral re-ionizing jets of quasars (from a toroid/AGN axis) does the same, and electron spin can be analogous. Quite a universal morphology perhaps? (literally - as CMB anisotropies match the pattern!)

Would you agree the big question is not just about 'life' or 'not life' but whether one day intelligent life may evolve. Perhaps then we may understand universes, (or at least my essay!) And on to that. I think I find a massively important bottom up causality derived from to down analysis. Please do read it if you can and give me your views.

Very best wishes

Peter

Dear Sara,

Interesting point of view. To put it in your terms I would find much more remarkable if life actually can be reduced to chemistry and physics (or information) than requiring anything not known to science today. I enjoyed the way you explain that Darwinian evolution is actually more general than the processes involved only in life itself. Isn't the appearance of the field of complex systems (greatly also influencing other areas such as artificial life) the acknowledge of the notion that even if life is reducible one cannot study it but at a higher level of description? A level of description where interactions between the parts can be accounted for.

The main downside of your approach is the overlooking (as various other essays do) the cutting-edge theories of complexity and information content, which is not Shannon's communication theory developed 60 years ago, but Algorithmic Information Theory (Kolmogorov complexity, variations of it and related measures). This would easily provide a possible explanation of the difference in genome length between a plant such as Paris Japonica compared to the relatively small human genome length by number of base pairs. From the Kolmogorov complexity perspective you would need to compare compressed genomes, from Bennett's logical depth you would need to compare uncompressing times from near compressed genomes, etc. to mention but 2 examples. This is a common straw man fallacy practice committed ignoring the current state of a field and substituting it with a misrepresented version of it (Shannon). In all other respects I think it is a well-written fine essay with very interesting suggestions.

Dear Sara Imari Walker

It seems to me that we have divided nature in two completely different worlds, the one that is made of carbon compounds, which consist mainly the annimate matter and the other with all the rest known elements, the inanimate matter.

There is strong evidence that the behavior of inanimate and animated matter may have some common characteristics and that nature does not make any distinction between them. This common behavior is manifested better in huge agglomeration of matter, like galaxy clusters and equally well in the behavior of primitive life like bacteria, virus, prion.

Maybe The Universe has been evolved as a self-organized system given the initial condition. It has the ability of reproduction and the power of multiplication.

In that case life in our Univers is not an accidental phenomenon but it is closely related with the structure of the universe.

But if the definition of life, is: a complex self-sustaining chemical network based on carbon biochemistry capable of undergoing Darwinian evolution, then what difference does it make from the definition of the inanimate matter.

Best wishes

B. Grispos