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Quantum physics, lifeforms, the human mind and the spirit world

There are various artificial life or synthetic life initiatives aimed at creating from non-living components, quasi natural life forms, chemical systems that are self contained and infinitely self-replicating. If such an effort were successful it would provide a great deal of knowledge about the nature of living systems. It would also provide methodology for engineering new life forms on a new level beyond the current genetic engineering methods.

Many scientists will assume that a living system is simply a molecular mechanism no different from in its fundamental nature from an artificial mechanism. However, there are other scientists who have suggested that perhaps this isn't true. An early example of such a comment was made by the physicist, Erwin Schroendinger. In a thin volume entitled, "What is Life?", he suggested that living systems are perhaps not fully covered by known laws of chemistry and physics. However, he didn't really develop the idea in his book.

Perhaps the first formal development of such an idea is contained in an essay by another physicist, Eugene Wigner, entitled "The probability of the existence of a self-replicating unit". His conclusion is that the probability is zero. In this model, a living system is represented as a state vector: v. Its environment would also have at least one state which permits the organism to multiply: w. The total state vector of the system, the organism and its environment would be represented by the direct Kronecker product of these two vectors: v X w. After replication, the state vector would be represented as v X v X r, that is two vectors representing a pair of organisms in the altered environment. This interaction was assumed to be random, more specifically, to be governed by a random symmetric Hamiltonian matrix. This assumption might be questioned, however, it was the same assumption that enabled John Von Neumann to complete a proof that the second law of thermodynamics is a consequence of quantum mechanics.

This is an article for a popular audience so these comments probably go over the heads of most readers. Suffice to say that Eugene Wigner and John Von Neumann most definitely were not cranks.

In 1964, P. T. Landsburg, a professor at University College in Cardiff, England published an article in Nature that reiterated Wigner's results and developed them further. More recently, Prashant Chakrabarty has compiled various arguments along these lines in a paper called, "Non existence of quantum mechanical self replicating machine" that can be found on-line. So there has been some suggestion over the years that a self-contained, infinitely self-replicating system is paradoxical from the standpoint of quantum mechanics.

In this article, we try to develop this idea and suggest some implications and possible experiments.

Perhaps the most pressing and immediate implication is that any effort to create an artificial quasi-natural self-replicating system based on the the assumption that such a system can be purely mechanistic may encounter problems. The products of such an effort may not be infinitely self-replicating. They might divide a few times, but there may be a cumulative degradation of the species with each replication that causes each lineage to eventually terminate as a result of non-viability.

One of the problems may be that a quasi natural system must necessarily exist in an aqueous environment at room temperature. Under these conditions, there is a large amount of molecular motion within the system that will cause disruption to any structured activity. The result is likely to be a chaotic system. As such, it exhibits characteristics for which chaotic systems are known such as:

• Sensitive dependence on initial conditions.
• Bifurcations that exist at intervals of a reference variable that are dictated by Feigenbaum's number.
• While definite statements might be made about average state of a population of such systems, it is impossible to predict the outcome in any specific instance because of the sensitive dependency and the effects of Brownian motion which are essentially random.

Therefore, with each successive generation, there may be a cumulative divergence from a vector state that is the functional equivalent of a known good initial state. The inevitable average outcome may be a divergence that is so great that it results in non-viability.

What sort of stabilization would keep the system "on-track". It would have to be plausible yet obscure. An idea that occurred to me a number of years ago is derived from what is known as Landauer's principle, first argued in 1961 by Rolf Landauer, a researcher with IBM. Roughly speaking, the idea is that a single bit of information is equivalent to an amount of negative entropy equal to k ln 2, that is, Planck's constant multiplied by the natural logarithm of 2.

Now most physicists would say that entropy is not a thing - it is an abstraction. It is the capacity of a system to do work, a convenient method for computing efficiency of heat engine cycles among other things. However, like everything else, as the frame of reference becomes smaller and smaller, there develops a sort of granularity. Space, for example, no longer conforms to the model proposed by Euclid. The number of points in a given volume are still infinite, but the infinity is now denumerable (a term taken from set theory) and the scale of this transition is defined by Heisenberg's principle of uncertainty. Likewise, going down to a molecular level, it may be that entropy no longer conforms to a Euclidean continuum of classical physics but starts to congeal into quanta: k ln 2 being of very plausible size of such a granulation. However, a quanta of entropy starts to assume characteristics associated with a "thing". It might possess something equivalent to a location within a system or it might associate itself in some way with a particular part of a molecular system.

One might imagine many such quanta in a cell, moving around, actually being used in such a way as to convey data from one part of the cell to another. After all, a quanta of entropy would be the thermodynamic equivalent of a bit of data. An artificial system might be able to use such a concept, however, artificial systems are generally far too large for such an effect to relevant.

So is this concept verifiable? Well, first of all, would-be creators of life may find that artificial systems have a very small amount of viability compared to natural systems. That would provide an impetus to look at this aspect of the problem much more carefully. Chemists will swear up and down that a molecule of synthetic biochemical is identical to a molecule of the same compound derived from a natural source. But it may turn out, that examination of individual molecules using something like force probe microscopy will show that molecules from a natural source are not quite the same as molecules created synthetically. They might exhibit quantum entanglement, which is a well-known and experimentally demonstrated effect. But it may be something of a more subtle nature such as residual entropic quanta that are still bound to the molecules. With entanglement, once it is detected, it is destroyed. So it may be possible to show that the effect is reproducible in a population of molecules but it may be inherently impossible to replicate a single measurement. Such is the almost ephemeral nature of quantum mechanics.

Up to this point, we have described work indicating that a self-contained, indefinitely self-replicating system may be paradoxical from the standpoint of quantum physics. If entropic quanta are simply an extension of quantum physics, then they still may come up short in resolving such a paradox.

The idea may require a further extension involving time. Entropic quanta would be neither matter nor energy. As such, traveling at speeds greater than light would not present the same issues as it would for a photon or a particle of matter. There is still the no-communication theorem, though. Such a principle applies to quantum entanglement. The time delay of an entanglement must conform to the no-communication theorem. Still, quantum physics is rather quirky and there seem to be odd loopholes in seemingly immutable principles, e.g., the re-phasing of light in cesium vapor results in a propagation delay slightly smaller than that of the speed of light in a vacuum.

If entropic quanta travel within a cell at the equivalent of super-luminary speeds, the time delay would assume the characteristics of a complex number, that is, containing a component multiplied by i, the square root of negative 1. That causes various problems that I will not try to resolve in this discussion. I simply suggest that the extended aspect that resolves the paradox may involve the fact that living systems do not exist entirely within the bounds of real time. This may suggest that they do not exist entirely within the bounds of real space either. The distance between two points of interaction within the reference frame of entropic quanta may be much smaller than the apparent distance measured in real space, sort of like a worm hole at a molecular level.

Such a possibility might have bearing on the classic philosophical question of the nature of freedom of will. For example, the neurobiologist, Dr. Gunther Stent has commented, "the idea of willing something freely is logically incompatible with another innate intuition of ours, namely, determinism. According to determinism, a network of causal connections determines everything that has happened in the past and will determine everything that is going to happen in the future. Hence, any event (including our willing something) would be the effect of a chain of prior events that were themselves determined by yet earlier events. Freedom of the will would thus be a mere delusion."

However, if all living systems including the human mind extend partly outside of real time and space, then they are not strictly deterministic. If such were the case, free will would have little to do with the linear determinism imposed by unidimensional and unidirectional constraints of real time.

If this extension is expressed in some sort of medium that can be identified and measured, perhaps entropic quanta for example, then it may be possible to demonstrate such an extension in a scientific manner. It may also be possible to make determination of some sort about existence outside of real space and time from a meta-time or a meta-space aspect of the human mind.

Every human culture on this planet seems to refer to an existence that is apparently outside of real space, a spirit world of some sort. If it is not bounded by real space, a reasonable extension of such a proposition is that is not bounded by real time either. An argument put forth against the existence of God is that such an existence would violate the law cause and effect. However, if the temporal aspect of God's existence has more than one dimension, then its locus might be illustrated by a circle or other locus with a topological genus greater than zero. It would have no beginning or end and thus would extend beyond assumptions derived from the law of cause and effect.

This article as well as others are posted on my forum at:
http://www.rimkor7.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=105#p117

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