Wandering Towards a Goal: The Key Role of Biomolecules by George F. R. Ellis

Sorry -- I thought I was logged in. And in my first paragraph I bracketed "presto!", which was interpreted as a (meaningless) HTML tag. I wanted to write "... with a presto!"

Dear George,

No, no intended spamming. Just that my post was being truncated due to a quotation symbol that created a parsing problem with the software in use here. Removed it and 3rd attempt successful. So let's leave behind the animosity here. But just like you told Robert Bennett that you are not going to write another essay, I am not either. So I'll be as brief as I can.

The list of factors that you mentioned to define life do not have defining value for the living in my view, they are about phenomenology, not ontology, and I don't care who came up with them. And even if you look beyond the terms, one can see that they are replicates of phenomenology that occur beyond the biosphere.

Organization in one or more building blocks can never have a defining value for anything. There are hydrogen atoms out there in empty space as singlets, and there are cumulations of hydrogen atoms in duplets (molecules) forming hydrogen gas out there in the cosmos and on planets. You sure would not agree that they are living entities on that basis.

Metabolism is a mechanism that is fundamentally driven by motion and activity, both for intake, which the author does not emphasize, and catabolism. The keyword here is autonomous motion. If the Brownian motion of smoke particles, driven by random kinetic motion of molecules, is not autonomous motion, then I don't know what is. Even one level down, the non-deterministic motion of the electron in an orbital shell is to be considered autonomous motion. That is why Schrodinger, I believe, used to think that the electron must be like an amorphous object (i.e. Amoeba) in response to perpetual sudden changes in momenta, and Einstein was no less than appalled by the behavior of this entity, stating that "he cannot imagine the electron hopping like a BUG".

Reproduction is in essence the ability to replicate oneself. The other terms of the definition constitute specificities on how the realization of replication is mediated. Keyword here: self -replication. I remind this author that a crystal put in the proper chemical environment will GROW by REPRODUCTION of its lattice unit. So much there too for GROWTH and ANABOLISM as defining factors of life.

Homeostasis is a process of maintaining constant thermal equilibrium developed by necessity in living entities, while beyond biota this process is autogenic as far as population of same or different objects in interaction. One can view systemic homeostasis as the modality of thermal equilibrium throughout the population of cells represented by biotic entities, necessary because the physics of juxtaposed cells or cell materials do not facilitate timely autogenic thermal equilibrium across the entire individual.

Adaptation and response to stimuli are epi-phenomena that are sub-functions of the above, which I will not discuss in the interest of keeping this short.

Here is the thing. If you want to define life, you have to go back to ontogeny, the merger of a mobile male gamete and a static female ovule as the fundamental karyotic duet of the life orchestra. It is an act of emulation of primal phylogenetic gestation whereby the mobile propagating male gamete plays the role of the space wavefunction and the static female karyotic box plays the role of mass. What ensues in the developmental life of the fertilized egg or female karyotic box (pre- and post-birth) is a re-enactment of the fundamental order of covariance between the two universal primal ontological tenets as it occurs in (abstract) phylogenetic space. Both real and emulated phylogenesis are realized under the regency of the most fundamental physical function, which I have called the Grand Eigenfunction, and its derivates. Very importantly, the choice of the word Kariot cannot be overstated, since the physical symmetry of the Karyotic building block is borne out of symmetry breaking not from the molecular gauge group but from the lattice or material gauge group as I have called it. And that is how the fundamental physical life constant arises as an invariant coupling quantity characterizing covariance between real karyotic coordinate space and karyotic mass. You see, at the fundamental level, life is not so much about what macromolecules do than it is about the directives that they receive from the higher karyotic gauge group.

My vision is not at all in hiding and my attitude in physics is not to play the prevalent game everywhere of zero-sum physics. You can read my contest paper and see how I have put the Quanto-Geometric Theory at work in elucidating in no equivocal terms the physics of human cognition. If you don't want to read my book "Quanto-Geometry", you can freely access my other papers on Research Gate and Academia.edu for solid primers. But you probably won't, and that is fine.

Sorry to force on you another long read (My! Looks like I've written another essay!!!), but you left me no choice. And shall I say that I believe exchange and dialogue are better than confrontation and discord, even in physics!

Joseph

George,

I think "function" rather than "purpose" or "intention" is a crucial difference. My heart is functioning while my mind is intending this reply. "Intention" implies a component of un-caused willfulness, which of course many scientists would deny.

> I don't think I claimed to have explained intentionality

Well, the question is "How can mindless mathematical laws give rise to aims and intention"

I suspect we're going to disagree on a number of points. But thanks for responding.

Hi George

Three points:

1. You say, "Life collects and analyses information in order to use it to plan and execute future purposeful actions in the light of memory."

This is a viewed that would be shared by most. But there is no known transition that explains the naturalisation of the process that turns raw physical interaction into physical interaction where some 'commodity of nature', typically referred to by the term 'information', gets 'carried' and thereby collected and analysed. What is the device of nature that turns the physics of interaction into the commodity of information in the first place? It is all very well saying that a certain mechanism of life can operate as a logic gate, but what determines the comparative meanings or values of the variables upon which the logic gates operate? How does a protein "read" genetic information? by which I mean, how does the meaning and value of one parameter become measurable against another?

2. You say "I am taking for granted that living systems are open non-equlibrium systems".

This is a curious thing to take for granted for the following reason. Surely 'a system' that is stable is acting, in virtue of that stability, as if it is in equilibrium i.e., it is not seeking an alternative state. Irrespective of the nature of its dynamic constituents, it is 'a stable system' and as such is an expression of a state in equilibrium. If we are to say that a stable system is not an expression of a state in equilibrium, then we must concede, that there is no such system in existence. There is no known system in existence that does not consist of constituent components. So, living systems are stable and, in any given instance that they are stable, they are in a state of equilibrium.

3. Also, you say, "There is no purpose in the existence of the Moon or an electron or in a collision of two gas particles." (also quoting Hartwell, Hopfield, Leibler and Murray 1999) The existence of, for example, an electron or a star is dependent on a complex series of interactions, each ensuring system stability--their stability is an expression of a state in equilibrium. One might say the reason why an electron or star exist is because they are stable. Can we not say of any stable physical system that their purpose is to maintain a state of equilibrium, because when, through interaction, stability is challenged, any given physical system will always adjust. In adjusting, they reacquire an equilibrium state once more, which may give rise either to renewed system stability or to system deformation. Perhaps human awareness is about the acquisition and continual maintenance of a conceptual stabilities whose states of equilibria are constantly challenged through experience, dialogue and thought.

Thank you for your extensive reply George- you must be exhausted from all the replies you have written.

I will definitely check out your book.

Again, best of luck-

Rick Searle

George,

Thanks for the Kohn link - I am always interested in any arguments (especially dimensional or scale-based estimations) that might have a bearing on limitations to entanglement or superposition.

I have seen some summary results before from that survey you mention, but had not seen those detailed tabulations until now.

I suppose it is gratifying to see that the bizarre Many Worlds Interpretation is only accepted by a relatively small proportion of physicists - but I was quite chagrined to see such low proportions expressing any knowledge concerning the measurement problem at all!

I can somewhat excuse the "Shut up and calculate" camp (i.e. aware of the issues, but choose to disregard until it impacts on their experimental setups) - especially if dealing with fairly prosaic fields of research. But that large parts of my professional community are not even aware of such an important philosophical issue (underlying our understanding of nature), I find rather mortifying (and perplexing!)... Sigh.

Regards,

David C.

Dear George,

I would have thought that a discussion of the basic ingredients and mechanisms of emergence -- multiple realizability, top-down causation, coarse graining vs. black boxing etc., topics upon which you touch in your technical notes 4 & 5 -- would have been more in line with the theme of the contest. Instead you chose to focus on biomolecules and convincingly argue that they may be the crucial link between lower level physics and higher level biology. Luckily, your choice leaves room for complementary pieces. :-)

Cheers, Stefan

Professor Ellis,

These FQXI blog tools are a great opportunity for me to ask experts like yourself about an idea I began discussing with Professor Tejinder Singh over multiple blog posts, starting with "this one".

Here's the idea: for each particle there is a "properTime = (clockTime, properTime)".

Then there should then be a mapping from clockTime to the set of all possible coordinate times.

Finally, each coordinate time should be assigned a possibility Ψ sub i.

Of course, there should be more to come. This is just the extent of the idea so far.

I would appreciate anything at all you might want to say about this!

Very Best Regards,

Lee

Dear George,

thank you very much for a clear and thought-provoking essay, and for your patience in engaging in discussion here! I was not aware of your book on physics and the mind and have now gladly added it to my reading list.

I have a few questions and notes.

The first thing that jumped at me in your essay is your statement that "The key difference between physics and biology is function or purpose." This may be true, but I would contend that it would need to be established rather than posited. I find it problematic on at least two counts:

• Absent a touchstone definition of what purpose is, it feels at the very least at risk of anthropomorphism. What is similar to us, what we use, is understood as purposive, the rest isn't. To the question "What is the Moon's purpose?" my answer would be "According to what criteria?" One simple way of seeing purpose is that "if it is removed, things break" (I do not claim that this is necessarily the best way, only that it does provide an example.) Seashore life forms are adapted to the tide -- may that give the Moon purpose? If the Moon's contribution to tidal heating is sufficient to help Earth maintain a molten core and through that a magnetic field that protects life from radiation, does it have purpose? I think that a clear definition here would help put your (excellent) argument on better ground.

• If "purpose" is both necessary and sufficient to define life (as seems to be indicated by it being the "key difference") then we have a single property of systems that can tell the biotic apart from the abiotic. This strikes me as wandering dangerously close to vitalism. I will quote Küppers (in "Information and the Origin of Life") since he states it better than I would: "A complete definition, that is, one embracing both necessary and sufficient criteria, would only be possible if the transition from the inanimate to the animate were discontinuous. However, the definition would then inevitably contain at least one irreducible concept, which would express the ontological difference between living and nonliving systems. Since this concept would by definition be life-specific, every holistic definition of 'life' must be inherently tautologous." Your position seems to be at risk of this circularity: evolution creates life, life is what is purposeful, purpose is evolutionary...

I have tried to address these issues in my essay (no doubt clumsily) by opting for a very minimalistic take on what purpose is (anything that is functional has purpose). I do not claim that it carries the intellectual day, but as a thought experiment I believe it may provide some contrast with accounts that assume that purpose is necessarily already complex.

Another, unrelated, question that your essay elicited stems from your discussion of levels ("groups, organisms, systems, cells, interaction networks, genes, and molecules"). It made me wonder if you believe that the back-and-forth between the enabling of selection at the microscale and the constraints from the macroscale influences (or even determines) which levels will solidify in between?

Thank you very much!