Essay Abstract

Are "less fundamental" things made out of "more fundamental" ones? Not in Life. Also the "less fundamental things" never can make up Life - it contains "More than everything". While a cell is indeed "made of atoms", it is more made of structural coded information with a long history and evolution. Is that process more fundamental than the cell? Is Life fundamental or "emergent"? Maybe a stupid question? Life is indeed made of atoms, but are atoms the fundamental process of life? No, of course not. Everything is made of the same kinds of atoms. The most fundamental are the physical laws, directing interactions and purposes. Are they the same? I have thought of the magic "What is Life" for some years now, and exactly the question above. What differ "living" atoms from ordinary ones? The answer is not in the matter itself, but what is the "tensions", "drive" or "life force". What may be the drive? We can see it as a process of limited "energy", expressed as number mitoses, quality of Life. We can see it as "negentropy" with entropy as opposite pole. Synergy maybe? We can see it as "work for free", differentiation through error correction, which we call "adaptation" of a stressed system. We see it as complexity, born from the adaptation, or we can see it as dissipative system, or quantum, non-dissipative dito. What if we see artificial intelligence, "living", almost like "living systems" do? Like Sophia, the first "robot citizen", sex-robots, warriors or the nurses helping elders. The emotional part is difficult, because we don't know what it is today, physically. So, let's discuss the "Life-force".

Author Bio

Ulla Mattfolk, free scientist, related to ﾃ...bo Academy. Finland. MSc. in biology, but I have studied physics in later years, open studies. The aim was to doctorate, see if I will ever have it done. Temporal heading: The Self-healing ability in organisms. I have thought a lot of What is Life, and I draw the coarse lines here. Much more can be said about the fundamentals, but the space is so scare, and it need the outlines, so I leave it like this. Enjoy. Many thanks to Pitkﾃ､nen, Joseph Kover and Jerry Decker.

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quote

What are the fundamentals of non-commuting charachters? Like a phase space, with "lifting"? We

have also different kinds of Logic, like classical binary used here, tripartite, non-classical,

quantum... etc. Logic is a Trickster

end of quote

What do you mean by the term, "non commuting characters? "

Can you be more specific?

Secondly you refer to "life as fundamental"

My physics mind asks the question, fundamental with respect to what ?

Not trying to be difficult. I am genuinely interested in this

    Dear Marianne Mattfolk,

    FQXI is clearly seeking to find out if there is a fundamental REALITY.

    Reliable evidence exists that proves that the surface of the earth was formed millions of years before man and his utterly complex finite informational systems ever appeared on that surface. It logically follows that Nature must have permanently devised the only single physical construct of earth allowable.

    All objects, be they solid, liquid, or vaporous have always had a visible surface. This is because the real Universe must consist only of one single unified VISIBLE infinite surface occurring eternally in one single infinite dimension that am always illuminated mostly by finite non-surface light.

    Only the truth can set you free.

    Joe Fisher, Realist

    I agree, life processes can serve as an indicator of fundamental process in physics. I also add Societies can do the same. All you need do is substitute "society" where You say "life"

    The universe is one.

      Non-commuting charachters are like band-gaps, as instance for an electron state, in a phase space. I gave two links to the 'lifing' due to so little space.

      https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ef/Solid_state_electronic_band_structure.svg/440px-Solid_state_electronic_band_structure.svg.png

      Here a many-body system of carbon atoms where the electrons has become non-local, and common to the whole structure, so they tend to 'lump together' forming spikes and holes, resp. ´We call it band-gaps and gapless states. The non-commuting states are the band-gaps, forbidden transfer through.

      Asymmetry: Band structures in non-crystalline solids

      Although electronic band structures are usually associated with crystalline materials, quasi-crystalline and amorphous solids may also exhibit band structures.[citation needed] These are somewhat more difficult to study theoretically since they lack the simple symmetry of a crystal, and it is not usually possible to determine a precise dispersion relation. As a result, virtually all of the existing theoretical work on the electronic band structure of solids has focused on crystalline materials.

      In insulators and semiconductors the Fermi level is inside a band gap; however, in semiconductors the bands are near enough to the Fermi level to be thermally populated with electrons or holes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_band_structure

      Asymmetric, quasicrystalline states have a 'degeneracy lifting' https://www2.ph.ed.ac.uk/~gja/qp/qp3.pdf for illustrations, or the wiki page.

      "The perturbed eigenstates of ˆH are linear combinations of degenerate eigenstates of ˆH0.

      This means that they too are eigenstates of Hˆ0 from a different eigenbasis." This means the eigenstates shifts, Changes. Penrose used the 'twistor lift' for it.

      "When we try to determine its energy shift we find a matrix equation which can only be solved for specific values of ¢Ej . These ¢Ej in turn correspond to specific choices for the coefficients cji, i.e. particular linear combinations of the unperturbed states. Thus to solve the equations we are forced to collapse the wavefunction onto an eigenstate of ˆ V . Vki is a Hermitian matrix, and consequently has real eigenvalues."

      You see the wave function 'collapse' is necessary to get the result 'real' or integer. It is a fractional state before the collapse, and every energy level has its own 'collapses'. Environment, or integers define it, and the result is final.

      I continue...

      Cont.

      Now in Life we have many-body states, very often chiral, bended and twisted, due to the carbon network. The energy bands cross many times, interact and 'collapse'. and it is not possible to reverse the process. You cannot any longer find the initial parts, it cannot be reduced, and this is the reason for my heading too. *More than everything' describes the emergence of new charachters etc. which is also required in the holographic Picture.

      Now, where is the hard problem of consciousness, the subjective experience? Is it inherent in all matter, also non-living, simple structured matter? Note that we have many of those reactions also in biology. Or does it make a new fundamental state, that then would be basic for all, also for bosons and fermions, so THEY become emergent?

      You maybe all remember Einsteins hesitations regarding quantum mechanics and the debate with Bohr. Suppose Einstein was right and we have a new 'more' fundamental base, seen in anyons, Anderson pseudospin, Schwinger bosons etc. https://www.osti.gov/scitech/servlets/purl/4389568 Simply, it all started from a bifurcative process of feedback-feedforwards, creating fermions as half-spins (negative add), and bosons as whole spins (positive add). It even has a name, Left-right symmetry, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1610.04209.pdf , intermediate statistics, http://users.physik.fu-berlin.de/~pelster/Anyon1/hansson.pdf and Fractional Statistics and Anyon Superconductivity (book) by Frank Wilczek. Feynman and Davies also talked about it, and that is used in Transactional measurement principle. Higgs boson also describes the same, with a dual energy band ('generations'), where the boson is seen for a minute time, at low energies.

      "In handling interactions people has used mean field theory and perturbation theory. Beyondthese two method, interaction is difficult to handle. We also know that repulsive interactionbetween bosons can make bosons behaves as fermions, while an attractive interaction betweenfermion can make fermions behaves like bosons. In this direction, it could be thought thata system of interacting bosons or fermions may be approximated effectively by a free particlesystem obeying different kind of statistics other than Bose and Fermi, and replacing effectivelytheir dynamical interaction with 'statistical interaction'. (24) Bose-like condensation in half-Bose half-Fermi statistics and in Fuzzy Bose-Fermi Statistics." https://www.researchgate.net/publication/252274770_Bose-like_condensation_in_half-Bose_half-Fermi_statistics_and_in_Fuzzy_Bose-Fermi_Statistics [accessed Jan 30 2018].

      In my mind we get a straight line of complexity going up the 'ladder' (A creates B creates C etc) from the Higgs boson to very complex molecules in Life. I would like to call this a fundamental rule of complexity, that especially describes Life, but it also lies behind all matter, seen as degenerate states.

      And the best of all is it is perfectly describing also SM :)

      Thanks for the questions, they were good ones, stuff that did not find room in the essay. This is the reason for the many links too.

      Best. Ulla Mattfolk.

      I also link Einsteins paper on the subject. Note:

      Either the QM description of the wavefunction is not complete, or

      when the operators corresponding to two physical quantities do not commute, the two quantities cannot have simultanous reality... http://www.drchinese.com/David/EPR.pdf

      I show here that after the 'error' corrections in energy levels, what we call 'collapse' of the wavefunction, the states can be 'real'.

      Where does the energy go? Does it carry information?

      One of my thoughts when I started my 'journey' into physics, was that Life can guide physics, show on a way out.... seems so?

      Thanks, Ulla Mattfolk.

      Regarding different kinds of Logic, I watched this http://slideplayer.com/slide/3870028/

      Boolean binary logic is the common one, but as instance when I ask something, I often want also an intermediate answer, not only yes or no. I Think it is too simplistic and even leads to errors when we use such a stiff frame. There are other kinds of logics we use, as instance a Child can see similarities between very separate things, and we also can link things very separate in distance.

      More about non-commuting charachters:

      Einstein used them in his pseudotensors, https://www.amazon.com/Meaning-Relativity-Including-Relativistic-Non-Symmetric/dp/0691120277/ref=reader_auth_dp

      and noted that: Clearly this pseudotensor for gravitational stress-energy is constructed exclusively from the metric tensor and its first derivatives. Consequently, it vanishes at any event when the coordinate system is chosen to make the first derivatives of the metric vanish because each term in the pseudotensor is quadratic in the first derivatives of the metric. However it is not symmetric, and is therefore not suitable as a basis for defining the angular momentum. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stress%E2%80%93energy%E2%80%93momentum_pseudotensor#Landau-Lifshitz_pseudotensor

      He had 3 objections, that maybe can be solved?

      Here we demonstrate that the quantum dynamics of quasiparticles in certain classes of nanostructured superconductors can be mapped onto a quantum rotor. Furthermore, we provide a straightforward experimental procedure to convert this nanoscale superconducting rotor into a regular or inverted quantum pendulum with tunable gravitational field, inertia, and drive. https://www.nature.com/articles/srep04542

      ln Anderson's paper. a perturbation theory t locator expansion t for the "self-energy" was constructed. taking the uncoupled sites as the zero-order problem and the /., as the perturbation. https://books.google.fi/books?id=ZyjW37iGhaQC&pg=PA12&lpg=PA12&dq=Landauer+pole+expansion+of+zero&source=bl&ots=Wy4RHsf-7G&sig=Xe04B6SY7l2XG7vIjwzj0P4G5Vc&hl=sv&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwje5JXNv4TZAhVEVywKHZ9YAzgQ6AEILzAB#v=onepage&q=Landauer%20pole%20expansion%20of%20zero&f=false

      The commutation relations of an arbitrary angular momentum vector can be reduced to those of the harmonic oscillator. This provides a powerful method for constructing and developing the properties of angular momentum eigenvectors. In this paper many known theorems are derived in this way, and some new results obtained. Among the topics treated are the properties of the rotation matrices; the addition of two, three, and four angular momenta; and the theory of tensor operators. https://www.osti.gov/scitech/biblio/4389568

      I propose we take a new look at this.

      Dear Ulla;

      Congratulations, a very thoughtful participation in the search for the foundational first cause. We ALL are searching in a reality that is hiding for us the most fundamental essence, I think. Here on FQXi there are about 200 thoughts about this quest for humanity, and believe me NO ONE has the ultimate answer. But that is no wonder because the human intelligence is just existing for a second, there is hope for the far future when will be further evolved....

      Now about your thoughts:

      "In search for Life what is needed more than a definition of Life is a definition of Death". Indeed where does our consciousness go, does it "go", is there an immortal soul ? The same questions are relevant when we ask "What before our birth" ? Was our consciousness then wandering around ?. I try to find answers in my essay.

      "Stability is a problem, and this gives the haemostasis principle?" You are mentioning the stability in crystals. The article about Sharon Glotzer (searching for the fundamental principles that govern how macroscopic properties emerge from microscopic interactions) where her research on the paradoxical role that entropy plays in the emergence of complexity and order may interest you. Here is the

      link.

      "A property cannot be diminished to fundamental bits.". This is really something to think about. Properties are emerging qualities that our awareness is attributing to "objects" and/or agents. It is comparable to "character" I think, so indeed difficult to atomise them. This is also the reason that self-assembly at nano-scale can dictate emergence of new functional properties at intermediate mesoscopic scale, because the new properties

      "If entropy is a measure of disorder, the Second Law of Thermodynamics says that to maintain ordered structure, it must get rid of the disorder that Life gives." Maybe it is also the other way around you could read the study of Canadian scientists where they propose that Human Consciousness could be a side effect of Entropy on this link to arxiv.

      "If anything, Life speed up the entropy in universe".I just don't think you a drawing the right conclusion here, maybe you are right but my view is that consciousness is the counterforce of entropy.

      "What kind of doping have microtubuli?" Inside our brain it is inside the microtubuli that the connection with quantum mechanics is created, it is possible the harbour of consciousness. (contact with Total Consciousness).

      There are more interesting points in your essay Ulla, but then my post would become too long, an essay on its own. I have read attentively your work and hope that you will also take some time to read my essay Foundational Quantum Reality Loops that among other things offers an alternative for the MWI.

      Best regards

      Wilhelmus de Wilde

        Thanks, Wilhelmus.

        For one thing, we don't know what consciousness is, other than it is 'subjective' as we experience it, still that experience is made up of billions of parts... and how is that related to information. What we have is a lots of misinformation, pure beliefs and assupmtions. We like our beliefs, don't want to get rid of them...

        Also, when we talk of 'intelligence' there are many kinds, like social, emotional... We often attribute it to only binary logic, which I Think is wrong. I want more than two optional answers...

        As instance math genuises are often seen as true genuises, because they use a language incomprehensible to most. I call it the Merlin language. Still genuises don't use math, but its symbols, Pictures, behaviours, processes... Hardly any math problem is simply deduced, and if so it is often plain wrong.

        Why do we need those lies?

        Stability is a problem, because Life is instability, reactivity. So what defines stability, we just call it homeostasis, allostasis etc. It is a stressreaction as so much else in our World. Stress is disruption and so on...

        A property is a property, and it must be exactly as it is to save its charachter. This is the 'More than everything' bit. Emergence is also a fundamental process, maybe, like Phil Gibbs said it. These thoughts and the thoughts about negentropy and non-dissipative states are not crisp and clear yet, need some more work, but I am pretty sure Life speed up entropy in total. Just look at our Mother Earth and her condition.

        Thanks for your nice Words.

        Ulla.

        I must add that these aspects of 'What is Life' would never have been this clear without the many hours talking to Joseph, analyzing his simulations. Very illuminating, and I have come to understand that the 'quantum' aspects are not more mystical than our ordinary World is. It is only about pixels, resolutions... working a bit differently. Many thanks to Joseph, once again.

        Indeed Ulla, there are so many things we don't understand, even the members here are using the words "stuff", "things", etc... Scientists are so stuck to their implementations of insecure things that they won't accept fresh idea's...

        Between black and white there are infinity shades of grey... That is why I hope that quantum computers will become nearer to what we call consciousness (next stage of evolution ?

        Humanity is full of stress to get their stomachs filled...

        As a matter of fact Phil is saying the same as I do, only he is more intelliget then I am because I cannot understand the Merlin language...I like mother earth but it has an illness : humanity....

        best regards

        Wilhelmus

        In a BEC are solitons that create friction. Now finnish researchers suspect they are quasistates, more findamental states...

        "What we suspect could be a source of the friction are quasi-particles trapped in the cores of the vortices. When the vortices accelerate, the particles gain kinetic energy which dissipates to surrounding particles and creates friction," explains Mäkinen.

        Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2018-02-friction-nonein-superfluids-absolute.html#jCp

        Dear Ulla.

        In general, I really appreciated your thoughtful conceptional way of explanation about the fundamental of life. I Have some similar idea about this topic, but the complexity of different level of systems and our limited knowledge has been puzzling issue of the Nature's fundamental.

        Perhaps, after reading carefully I will give comments.

        Best wishes.

        Bashir.

          It is exactly the complexity that is so wonderful, and can be explained like this, as also Schrödinger thought. But we shall not diminish the complexity to chromosomes alone, they are just a part of the whole, maybe not even the biggest part. The quasi-states as a dual frame solve it. Our World is both classical and quantum too.

          Ulla Mattfolk.

          Ulla,

          Fascinating stuff which was more so due to my interest in the subject. I certainly connected with most, indeed my essay last year more than touched on it; stacking structures etc. (I'm not sure you read it but I included a possible quantum interaction process for RNA mutation).

          I also discussed cognitive dissonance and loved your; "When we get some meaningful construct out of that information it is very difficult to reverse it. Unlearning is hard."

          and loved the Schrodinger quote; "The obvious inability of present-day physics and chemistry to account for such events is no reason at all for doubting that they can be accounted for by those sciences."

          Sorry I couldn't find anything to question, but learned a lot, and liked the terminology intro, very useful.

          Great stuff, and pretty fundamental. Pencilled in at 8. My own this year completes the underlying quantum interaction mechanism classically, seminally shocking to many - who'd have to 'unlearn' quite a lot!! I hope you'll read and like it.

          Very Best

          Peter

            Thanks Peter.

            No, I did not read your essay last year, must do it now.

            It was an awful lots of job behind this, sometimes I am a bit ?

            I would have wanted to explore more on the term 'complexity as fundamental principle' giving emergent properties...maybe even behind gauge symmetries - it must be Another time.

            Deformed symmetries are interesting. They form new 'stable' ones, protected, until again broken in an endless chain.

            I have also made a study of quantum interactions and measurements, but I became unsure what to Think about it, such a mess. I will read it, yes. Thanks

            Ulla Mattfolk.

            Dear Ulla Marianne Mattfolk

            Wonderful discussion on Life.... Life is indeed made of atoms, but are atoms the fundamental process of life? No, of course not...... What differ "living" atoms from ordinary ones? The answer is not in the matter itself, but what is the "tensions", "drive" or "life force". What may be the drive? We can see it as a process of limited "energy", expressed as number mitoses, quality of Life. We can see it as "negentropy" with entropy as opposite pole. Synergy maybe? We can see it as "work for free", differentiation through error correction, which we call "adaptation" of a stressed system................. Keep it up sir, continue your thinking.... by the way...

            Here in my essay energy to mass conversion is proposed................ yours is very nice essay best wishes .... I highly appreciate hope your essay and hope for reciprocity ....You may please spend some of the valuable time on Dynamic Universe Model also and give your some of the valuable & esteemed guidance

            Some of the Main foundational points of Dynamic Universe Model :

            -No Isotropy

            -No Homogeneity

            -No Space-time continuum

            -Non-uniform density of matter, universe is lumpy

            -No singularities

            -No collisions between bodies

            -No blackholes

            -No warm holes

            -No Bigbang

            -No repulsion between distant Galaxies

            -Non-empty Universe

            -No imaginary or negative time axis

            -No imaginary X, Y, Z axes

            -No differential and Integral Equations mathematically

            -No General Relativity and Model does not reduce to GR on any condition

            -No Creation of matter like Bigbang or steady-state models

            -No many mini Bigbangs

            -No Missing Mass / Dark matter

            -No Dark energy

            -No Bigbang generated CMB detected

            -No Multi-verses

            Here:

            -Accelerating Expanding universe with 33% Blue shifted Galaxies

            -Newton's Gravitation law works everywhere in the same way

            -All bodies dynamically moving

            -All bodies move in dynamic Equilibrium

            -Closed universe model no light or bodies will go away from universe

            -Single Universe no baby universes

            -Time is linear as observed on earth, moving forward only

            -Independent x,y,z coordinate axes and Time axis no interdependencies between axes..

            -UGF (Universal Gravitational Force) calculated on every point-mass

            -Tensors (Linear) used for giving UNIQUE solutions for each time step

            -Uses everyday physics as achievable by engineering

            -21000 linear equations are used in an Excel sheet

            -Computerized calculations uses 16 decimal digit accuracy

            -Data mining and data warehousing techniques are used for data extraction from large amounts of data.

            - Many predictions of Dynamic Universe Model came true....Have a look at

            http://vaksdynamicuniversemodel.blogspot.in/p/blog-page_15.html

            I request you to please have a look at my essay also, and give some of your esteemed criticism for your information........

            Dynamic Universe Model says that the energy in the form of electromagnetic radiation passing grazingly near any gravitating mass changes its in frequency and finally will convert into neutrinos (mass). We all know that there is no experiment or quest in this direction. Energy conversion happens from mass to energy with the famous E=mC2, the other side of this conversion was not thought off. This is a new fundamental prediction by Dynamic Universe Model, a foundational quest in the area of Astrophysics and Cosmology.

            In accordance with Dynamic Universe Model frequency shift happens on both the sides of spectrum when any electromagnetic radiation passes grazingly near gravitating mass. With this new verification, we will open a new frontier that will unlock a way for formation of the basis for continual Nucleosynthesis (continuous formation of elements) in our Universe. Amount of frequency shift will depend on relative velocity difference. All the papers of author can be downloaded from "http://vaksdynamicuniversemodel.blogspot.in/ "

            I request you to please post your reply in my essay also, so that I can get an intimation that you replied

            Best

            =snp