Connecting the Dots

From quanta to beings to consciousness to universe to spirit

Tonight: quantum electric beings

The Rainbow and the Worm

The Physics of Organisms Mae-Wan Ho
Biography

Ho received a Ph. D. in Biochemistry in 1967 from Hong Kong University, was Postdoctoral Fellow in Biochemical Genetics, University of California San Diego, from 1968 to 1972, Senior Research Fellow in Queen Elizabeth College, Lecturer in Genetics (from 1976) and Reader in Biology (from 1985) in the Open University, and since retiring in June 2000 Visiting Professor of Biophysics in Catania University, Sicily.[2][4][3]

Earth Spirit: "In the endless torrents of life in action's storm I weave and wave in endless motion cradle and grave a timeless ocean ceaselessly weaving the tissue of living constantly changing blending, arranging the humming loom of Time I ply and weave the web of Divinity"

Faust

 Life has learned to catch electrons in the excited state and use the excess energy for life processes

Energy is trapped directly at the electronic level It is stored not only as vibrational and electronic bond energies, but also in the structure of the system

 It would be wrong to think of the electron as a minute charged particle orbiting the nucleus It is more like a complex probability cloud distributed over the whole three-dimensional orbital, as consistent with the wave-particle duality of all matter (as well as light).

 a protein or DNA sequence has more than one function But it sings one note for each function to which its binding partner, which could be another protein, or a small molecule, resonates.

Fractal Heart Rhythm

the researchers have discovered that positive emotions, such as love and appreciation, as opposed to negative emotions such as anger and frustration, give rise to a particular heart rhythm that is more 'coherent', and appears to be associated with a general sense of wellbeing.

Coherent Heart Rhythm of Positive Emotions

Sustained positive emotions generate a smooth, sine-wave-like pattern in the heart's rhythm, which is characteristic of the state of 'psychophysiological coherence'.

Light and Living Matter

photons are held in a coherent form in the organism, and when stimulated, are emitted coherently, like a very weak multimode laser ranging over all frequencies

Communication Between Cells, etc

it appears that the muscle actually receives the signals for enhanced coordinated action long before the motor signals arrive
March 13, 2009

 As the embryo develops, however, conditions favourable for stimulated coherent emission of the trapped photons may become realised. In connection with the trapping or storage of photons, it has been observed that death in organisms invariably begins with a sharp increase in the intensity of light emission, which can persist undiminished for more than 48 hours.

 The most remarkable implication of our findings is that organisms are completely liquid crystalline.

 There is something special about living matter in an organism that is alive.

The same molecules, from big to small, especially the water, made up of atoms of different kinds, the electrons around the atoms, all, are transformed by being in an organism that is alive. They are not longer the same electrons, atoms, or molecules.

liquid crystalline is the state or phase of matter in between the solid and the liquid, hence the term mesophase. Unlike liquids, which have little or no molecular order, liquid crystals have an orientation order. But unlike solid crystals, liquid crystals are flexible, malleable, and responsive. Liquid crystals are 'tunable responsive systems', and as such, ideal for making organisms.

Quantum Experience & Conscious Experience

The unity of experience depends, in the first instance, on the organism's experience of itself
as a unity, and not as a collection of disparate parts. It is the 'I' that each and every one of us experiences ourselves to be.

Many people have remarked on the holographic nature of brain memory in that it is able to survive large brain lesions. All the more so if memory is delocalised, not just over the entire brain, but also over the entire liquid crystalline continuum of the body. This is fully consistent with the 'romantic' idea, increasingly validated by the foundations of quantum theory, that all nature is

If the water molecules are aligned with +alternating in a chain, then a 'jump' conduction of positive electricity could take place. This is faster than ordinary electricity passing through a wire and much, much faster than charged ions diffusing through water.

nanotubes

Acupuncture Revisited: Cho Zang-Hee, who pioneered the PET scanner, showed in test after test, that the meridian points do correlate with areas of the brain

Cho had set a new trend in acupuncture investigations. Many fMRI and PET scan studies were to follow, which demonstrated that acupuncture treatments could indeed stimulate or inhibit specific parts of the brain, though the story is more complicated, as there are different schools of acupuncture.

Schrodinger's Entanglement: two particles entangled with each other in a pure , coherent state ... even long after they have separated A quantum world is a radically interconnected, interdependent world where every entity, from elementary particle to galaxy, evolves like an organism, entangled with all there is in nature.

Quantum Coherence: Implies correlation, connectedness, also consistency in the system. So we refer to people's speech or thought as coherent. Thus, coherence always refers to wholeness, and quantum coherence only more so. A coherent state thus maximises both global cohesion and local freedom.

The biochemical picture we now have of the living system: compartment, microcompartments and micro-domains, right down to molecular machines, protons and electrons, each functioning autonomously, doing very different things at their own rates, yet all couples together.

The predominant interactions in the liquid crystalline organism, as in any liquid crystalline systems, are electromagnetic and electromechanical and necessarily so, for those are the only ways in which molecules interact and form the various hierarchies of supramolecular assemblies that make up living organisms themselves.

Living organisms depend on quantum reactions, not only in the sense that quantum tunneling is explicitly recognised in electron and proton transfer, but especially in the sense that all energy transductions are carried out by individual enzymes and other molecules acting as 'quantum energy machines' in which individual quanta of energy released are directly transferred from point of release to the point of

The coordination of such activities requires nothing short of quantum coherence, especially in view of the rapidity and specificity with which responses or intercommunication can take place in the living system.

Consciousness - the facilities of sentience, responsiveness and memory - may be understood as a macroscopic quantum wave function inhering in the liquid crystalline continuum of the organism. Organisms are quantum superpositions of coherent activities. This has profound implications on the nature of knowledge and knowledge acquisition, as well as issues of determinism and free will.

Perhaps such a state of enlightenment is just what Plato envisaged as being one with the Divine Mind; or, as the Taoists of ancient China would say, being one with the Tao, the creative principle that is responsible for all the multiplicity of things.

Determinism and Free Will

At the end of his book, What is Life?, Schrodinger has this to say on determinism and free will, "...let us see if we cannot draw the correct, non-contradictory conclusion from the following two premises: (i) My body functions as a pure mechanism according to the Laws of Nature. (ii)Yet I know, by incontrovertible direct experience, that I am directing its motions, of which I foresee the effect, that may be fateful and all-important, in which case I feel and take full responsibility for them.

'The only possible inference from these two facts is, I think, that I - I in the widest meaning of the word, that is to say, every conscious mind that has ever said or felt "I" - am the person, if any, who controls the "motion of the atoms" according to the Laws of Nature...'

'... consciousness is never experienced in the plural, only in the singular...' That description is just what the state of coherence entails: a multiplicity that is singular, the 'self' is a domain of coherence, a pure state that permeates the whole of our consciousness.

But as the self is also distributed, to be true to 'self' does not imply acting against others. On the contrary, sustaining others sustains the self; so being true to others is also being true to self. It is only within a mechanistic Darwinian perspective that freedom becomes perverted into acts against others. "...to be free, 'must mean to be conscious." John Stuart Mill

One might represent consciousness as a wave function that evolves, constantly being transformed by experience and creating experience in overt acts. In a sense, the quantum coherent organism is most spontaneous and free, which is the Taoist ideal in poetry and art, and indeed in life itself.

The 'wave function' that is consciousness never collapses, but is always changing, and always unique, as it is 'coloured' by all the tones of our personality and experience. Each significant experience becomes entangled in our being, constituting a new wave function, in much the same way that particles of independent origins become entangled after they have interacted. This would also be in line with David Bohm and Basil Hiley's ontological interpretation of quantum theory, which does not recognise the collapse of the wave function.

The reason we experience our macroscopic world so differently from the microscopic world may be tied up with the space-time structure of reality. It could be that, were we the dimensions of elementary particles, we too would experience our world as being inhabited by self-possessed, coherent beings with a free will, and we would be most surprised to find that human-sized observers are trying to predict which state we are going to 'collapse' into next.

In the same way, an external observer of galactic dimensions would find our human behaviour completely 'quantum and unpredictable.

Nature is ever-present to us, as we are to ourselves. This ever-present is structured, as we have seen. Our experience consists of the catenation of events of different durations that propagates and reverberates in and around our being, constantly being registered and recreated. What constitutes memory of some event is the continuing present for the overarching process of which the event is part.

The universe of coherent space-time structures is thus a nested hierarchy of individualities and communities that come into being through acts of prehensive unification. It is a truly participatory, creative universe. Just as the organism is ever-present to itself during its entire life history, and all other individualities are ever-present to it, the universe is everpresent to itself.

The universe is ever-present to itself in the universal duration where creation never ceases by the convocation of individual acts, now surfacing from the energy substrate, now condensing to new patterns, now submerging to re-emerge in another guise. (remember Faust?)

Reality is thus a shimmering presence of infinite planes, a luminous labyrinth of the active now connecting 'past' and 'future', 'real' with 'ideal', where potential unfolds into actual and actual enfolds to further potential through the free action and intention of the organism. It is a sea awash with significations, dreams and desires. This reality we carry with us, an ever-present straining towards the future. The act is the cause; it is none other than the creation of meaning, the realisation of the ideal and the consummation of desire.

End of "The Rainbow..." Up next time: "The Electric Universe" plasma physics... the last piece of the puzzle