New Physics of Life (Origins)

by David Turell , Saturday, April 07, 2018, 19:24 (2211 days ago) @ David Turell

An essay tries to combine the discipline of physics and biology. It notes that life shows purposeful activity to maintain its equilibrium of life, not the equilibrium of inanimate matter, but struggles to apply physics:

https://aeon.co/essays/across-the-wide-gulf-how-to-get-life-out-of-quantum-physics?utm_...

"Physics deals with the basic properties of matter and energy and how they interact. Chemistry asks how atoms get together to form more complex molecules and what effect this has on the resulting substances. What both have in common is that they study inanimate matter.

"Biology, on the other hand, studies living organisms. And here we encounter the central obstacle to seeing all of natural science as one big coherent whole. Inanimate matter seems to obey the laws of nature without exception and down to the last letter. Living things, by contrast, appear to have a will of their own. They are best understood — perhaps even best defined — by what might be called purposiveness. They try to do things, and while they cannot violate the laws of nature, they certainly can exploit them in order to realise their goals. You can’t say the same for inanimate matter.

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"I am not merely asking whether living systems can exploit the stranger aspects of quantum physics to improve their chances of survival. The simple answer to that is, yes, it appears they do. There is evidence to suggest that even the quirkiest of quantum effects, quantum entanglement, is used by photosynthesising plants to channel light energy towards their energy-producing parts by the most efficient route. ... Very few people expected that the full repertoire of quantum physics could survive in macroscopic, warm and wet, noisy environments such as plants and birds. Surprise and excitement at these hints that they do has inspired an emerging field called quantum biology, which captivates a growing body of scientists as much as the public.

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"For Boltzmann, life is trying to stay away from equilibrium, away from the state of inanimate (dead) matter. It does this by sucking in low-entropy stuff from the environment, thereby pushing its own levels of disorder away from the maximum. Another pioneer of quantum physics, the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger, also emphasised the idea that life tries to maximise free energy, namely the energy available to do useful work. This is another way of saying that it wants to stay away from equilibrium. In this respect it differs from, for example, a stone, which when left to its own devices just stays as it is and does not try to do anything useful.

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"The latest chapter in the attempt to derive biology from physics comes from an Israeli physicist, Addy Pross. He suggests that, very much as inanimate matter conforms to thermodynamics by maximising entropy, living beings strive to maximise what he calls ‘kinetic stability’. This is not the same as maximising entropy production. Rather than reaching a passive state of equilibrium, as all inanimate matter inevitably does according to the Second Law, living systems achieve a dynamically stable state, but they have to keep working in order to maintain it. The dynamically stable state is fragile and needs constant re-establishment.

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"We started by saying that what discriminates living from non-living systems is a sense of purpose. If biology is reducible to quantum physics, and typical quantum objects such as atoms and molecules show no sense of purpose, where does the transition occur? Where does the ‘desire’ to achieve the state of kinetic stability come from? This, of course, brings us back to square one. One easy way out is to conclude that purposefulness is simply an illusion. Pross would probably say that it is an emergent property that arises when chemistry becomes complicated enough. But given that this sense of purposefulness is how we identify life in the first place, perhaps we should resist conclusions that seem to wave it away too easily."

Comment: Life is a particular form of dis-equilibrium. It shows purpose; it amazingly uses quantum mechanics; it must have a constant supply of energy to achieve all of this. And this is why I think consciousness is a quantum activity using the brain to appear available to us to develop a personality from birth onward. I think it is logical for Penrose to pursue this possibility.