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Relevant Links: * i-sis news #6
* Xenotransplantation - How Bad Science and Big
Business Put the World at Risk from Viral Pandemics
* The Organic Revolution in Science and
Implications for Science and Spirituality
* Use and Abuse of the Precautionary Principle
* i-sis news #5
The Biology of Free Will*
Mae-Wan Ho
Bioelectrodynamics Laboratory,
Open University, Walton Hall,
Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA, U.K.
Journal of Consciousness Studies 3, 231-244, 1996.
Abstract
I. Introduction
o The new organicism
II. The organism frees itself from the `laws' of physics
III. The organism is free from mechanical determinism
o The polychromatic organism
o The organism is a free sentient being
and hence able to decide its own fat
IV. The organism frees itself from mechanistic control
as an interconnected, intercommunicating whole
o Long-range energy continua in cells and tissues
o Organism and environment -- a mutual partnership
V. The organism as an autonomous coherent whole
o Organisms are polyphasic liquid crystals
o Quantum coherence in living organisms
o The freedom of organisms
Acknowledgments
Notes
References
Abstract: According to Bergson (1916), the traditional problem of
free will is misconceived and arises from a mismatch between the
quality of authentic, subjective experience and its description in
language, in particular, the language of the mechanistic science
of psychology. Contemporary western scientific concepts of the
organism, on the other hand, are leading us beyond conventional
thermodynamics as well as quantum theory and offering rigorous
insights which reaffirm and extend our intuitive, poetic, and even
romantic notions of spontaneity and free will. I shall describe
some new views of the organism arising from new findings in
biology, in order to show how, in freeing itself from the `laws'
of physics, from mechanical determinism and mechanistic control,
the organism becomes a sentient, coherent being that is free, from
moment to moment, to explore and create its possible futures.
* Based on a lecture delievered at the 6th Mind & Brain
Symposium, The Science of Consciousness -- The Nature of Free
Will, November 4, 1995, Institute of Psychiatry, London.
I. Introduction
Distinguished neurophysiologist Walter Freeman (1995) begins his
latest book by declaring brain science "in crisis": his personal
quest to define constant psychological states arising from given
stimuli has ended in failure after 33 years. Patterns of brain
activity are simply unrepeatable, every perception is influenced
by all that has gone before. The impasse, he adds, is conceptual,
not experimental or logical. This acknowledged breakdown of
mechanical determinism in brain science is really long overdue,
but it should not be miscontrued as the triumph of vitalism. As
Freeman goes on to show, recent developments in nonlinear
mathematics can contribute to some understanding of these
non-repeatable brain activities.
The traditional opposition between mechanists and vitalists
already began to dissolve at the turn of the present century, when
Newtonian physics gave way to quantum theory at the very small
scales of elementary particles and to general relativity at the
large scales of planetary motion. The static, deterministic
universe of absolute space and time is replaced by a multitude of
contingent, observer-dependent space-time frames. Instead of
mechanical objects with simple locations in space and time, one
finds delocalized, mutually entangled quantum entities that carry
their histories with them, like evolving organisms. These
developments in contemporary western science gave birth to
organicist philosophy.
A key figure in organicist philosophy was the French philosopher,
Henri Bergson (1916), who showed how Newtonian concepts -- which
dominate biological sciences then and now -- negate psychology's
claims to understand our inner experience at the very outset. In
particular, he drew attention to the inseparability of space and
time, both tied to real processes that have characteristic
durations. The other major figure in organicist philosophy was the
English mathematician-philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead (1925)
who saw physics itself and all of nature, as unintelligible
without a thorough-going theory of the organism that participates
in knowing.
Organicist philosophy was taken very seriously by a remarkable
group of people who formed the multidisciplinary Theoretical
Biology Club.[1] Its membership included Joseph Needham, eminent
embryologist/biochemist later to be renowned for his work on the
history of Chinese science, Dorothy Needham, muscle physiologist
and biochemist, geneticist C.H. Waddington, crystallographer J.D.
Bernal, mathematician Dorothy Wrinch, philosopher, J.H. Woodger
and physicist, Neville Mott. They acknowledged the full complexity
of living organization, not as axiomatic, but as something to be
explained and understood with the help of philosophy as well as
physics, chemistry, biology and mathematics, as those sciences
advance, and in the spirit of free enquiry, leaving open whether
new concepts or laws may be discovered in the process.
A lot has happened since the project of the Theoretical Biology
Club was brought to a premature end when they failed to obtain
funding from the Rockefeller Foundation. Organicism has not
survived as such, but its invisible ripples have spread and
touched the hearts and minds, and the imagination of many who
remain drawn to the central enigma that Erwin Schrödinger (1944)
later posed: What is Life?
In the intervening years, the transistor radio, the computer and
lasers have been invented. Whole new disciplines have been
created, nonequilibrium thermodynamics, solid state physics and
quantum optics to name but a few. In mathematics, nonlinear
dynamics and chaos theory took off in a big way during the 1960s
and 70s. Perhaps partly on account of that, many nonlinear
physical and physicochemical phenomena are being actively
investigated only within the past ten years, as physics become
more and more organic in its outlook.
In a way, the whole of science is now tinged with organicist
philosophy, as even "consciousness" and "free will" are on the
scientific agenda. Bergson (1916) has made a persuasive case that
the traditional problem of free will is simply misconceived and
arises from a mismatch between the quality of authentic,
subjective experience and its description in language, in
particular, the language of the mechanistic science of psychology.
In a recent book, I have shown how contemporary western scientific
concepts of the organism are leading us beyond conventional
thermodynamics as well as quantum theory (Ho, 1993), and offering
rigorous insights which reaffirm and extend our intuitive, poetic,
and even romantic notions of spontaneity and free will.
The new organicism
I am making a case for organicist science. It is not yet a
conscious movement but a Zeitgeist I personally embrace, so I
really mean to persuade you to do likewise by giving it a more
tangible shape. The new organicism, like the old, is dedicated to
the knowledge of the organic whole, hence, it does not recognize
any discipline boundaries. It is to be found between all
disciplines. Ultimately, it is an unfragmented knowledge system by
which one lives. There is no escape clause allowing one to plead
knowledge `pure' or `objective', and hence having nothing to do
with life. As with the old organicism, the knowing being
participates in knowing as much as in living. Participation
implies responsibility, which is consistent with the truism that
there can be no freedom without responsibility, and conversely, no
responsiblity without freedom. There is no placing mind outside
nature as Descartes has done, the knowing being is wholeheartedly
within nature: heart and mind, intellect and feeling (Ho, 1994a).
It is non-dualist and holistic. In all those respects, its
affinities are with the participatory knowledge systems of
traditional indigenous cultures all over the world.
From a thorough-going organicist perspective, one does not ask,
"What is life?" but, "What is it to be alive?". Indeed, the best
way to know life is to live it fully. It must be said that we do
not yet have a fully fledged organicist science. But I shall
describe some new images of the organism, starting from the more
familiar and working up, perhaps to the most sublime, from which a
picture of the organism as a free, spontaneous being will begin to
emerge. I shall show how the organism succeeds in freeing itself
from the `laws' of physics, from mechanical determinism and
mechanistic control, thereby becoming a sentient, coherent being
that, from moment to moment, freely explores and creates its
possible futures.
II. The organism frees itself from the `laws' of physics
I put `laws' in quotation marks in order to emphasize that they
are not laid down once and for all, and especially not to dictate
what we can or cannot think. They are tools for helping us think;
and most of all, to be transcended if necessary.
Many physicists have marvelled at how organisms seem able to defy
the Second Law of Thermodynamics, starting from Lord Kelvin,
co-inventor of the Second Law, who nevertheless excluded organisms
from its dominion:
"The animal body does not act as a thermodynamic engine
. . . consciousness teaches every individual that they
are, to some extent, subject to the direction of his
will. It appears therefore that animated creatures have
the power of immediately applying to certain moving
particles of matter within their bodies, forces by which
the motions of these particles are directed to produce
derived mechanical effects."[2]
What impresses Lord Kelvin is how organisms seem to have energy at
will, whenever and wherever required, and in a perfectly
coordinated way. Another equally puzzling feature is that,
contrary to the Second Law, which says all systems should decay
into equilibrium and disorder, organisms develop and evolve
towards ever increasing organization. Of course, there is no
contradiction, as the Second Law applies to isolated systems,
whereas organisms are open systems. But how do organisms manage to
maintain themselves far away from thermodynamic equilibrium and to
produce increasing organization? Schrödinger writes:
"It is by avoiding the rapid decay into the inert state
of `equilibrium' that an organism appears so enigmatic.
. . . What an organism feeds upon is negative entropy,
or, to put it less paradoxically, the essential thing in
metabolism is that the organism succeeds in freeing
itself from all the entropy it cannot help producing
while alive."[3]
Schrödinger was severely reprimanded,[4] by Linus Pauling and
others, for using the term `negative entropy', for it really does
not correspond to any rigorous thermodynamic entity. However, the
idea that open systems can "self-organize" under energy flow
became more concrete in the discovery of "dissipative structures"
(Prigogine, 1967). An example is the Bénard convection cells that
arise in a pan of water heated uniformly from below. At a critical
temperature difference between the top and the bottom, a phase
transition occurs: bulk flow begins as the lighter, warm water
rises from the bottom and the denser, cool water sinks. The whole
pan eventually settles down to a regular honeycomb array of flow
cells. Before phase transition, all the molecules move randomly
with respect to one another. However, at a critical rate of energy
supply, the system self-organizes into global dynamic order in
which all the astronomical numbers of molecules are moving in
formation as though choreographed to do so.
A still more illuminating physical metaphor for the living system
is the laser (Haken, 1977), in which energy is pumped into a
cavity containing atoms capable of emitting light. At low levels
of pumping, the atoms emit randomly as in an ordinary lamp. As the
pumping rate is increased, a threshold is reached when all the
atoms oscillate together in phase, and send out a giant light
track that is a million times as long as that emitted by
individual atoms. Both examples illustrate how energy input or
energy pumping and dynamic order are intimately linked.
These and other considerations led me to identify Schrödinger's
"negative entropy" as "stored mobilizable energy in a space-time
structured system" (Ho, 1994b, 1995a). The key to understanding
the thermodynamics of living systems turns out not so much to be
energy flow but energy storage under energy flow (Fig. 1). Energy
flow is of no consequence unless the energy can be trapped and
stored within the system where it circulates to do work before
dissipating. A reproducing life cycle, i.e., an organism, arises
when the loop of circulating energy is closed. At that point, we
have a life cycle, within which stored energy is mobilized,
remaining largely stored as it is mobilized.
Figure 1 here
The life cycle is a highly differentiated space-time structure,
the predominant modes of activity are themselves cycles spanning
an entire gamut of space-times from the local and fast (or slow)
to the global and slow (or fast), all of which are coupled
together. These cycles are most familiar to us in the form of
biological rhythms extending over 20 orders of magnitude of time,
from electrical activities of neurons and other cells to circadian
and circa-annual rhythms and beyond. An intuitive picture is given
in Figure 2, where coupled cycles of different sizes are fed by
the one-way energy flow. This complex, entangled space-time
structure is strongly reminiscent of Bergson's "durations" of
organic processes, which necessitates a different way of
conceptualizing space-time as heterogeneous, nonlinear,
multidimensional and nonlocal (see Ho, 1993).[5]
Figure 2 here
On account of the complete spectrum of coupled cycles, energy is
stored and mobilized over all space-times according to the
relaxation times (and volumes) of the processes involved. So,
organisms can take advantage of two different ways of mobilizing
energy with maximum efficiency -- nonequilbrium transfer in which
stored energy is transferred before it is thermalized, and
quasi-equilibrium transfer, for which the free energy change
approaches zero according to conventional thermodynamic
considerations (McClare, 1971). Energy input into any mode can be
readily delocalized over all modes, and conversely, energy from
all modes can become concentrated into any mode. In other words,
energy coupling in the living system is symmetrical, which is why
we can have energy at will, whenever and wherever required (see
Ho, 1993, 1994b, 1995a,b). The organism is, in effect, a closed,
self-sufficient energetic domain of cyclic non-dissipative
processes coupled to the dissipative processes. In the formalism
of conventional thermodynamics, the life cycle can be considered,
to first approximation, to consist of all those cyclic processes
-- for which the net entropy change balances out to zero --
coupled to those dissipative processes necessary for keeping it
going, for which the net entropy change is greater than zero (see
Figure 3). This representation, justified in detail elsewhere (Ho,
1996a), is derived from the thermodynamics of the steady state
(see Denbigh, 1951).
Figure 3 here
Consequently, the organism has freed itself from the immediate
constraints of energy conservation -- the First Law -- as well as
the Second Law of thermodynamics. There is always energy available
within the system, which is mobilized at close to maximum
efficiency and over all space-time modes. [6]
III. The organism is free from mechanical determinism
It was geneticist/embryologist C.H. Waddington (1957) who first
introduced nonlinear dynamical ideas into developmental biology in
the form of the `epigenetic landscape' -- a general metaphor for
the dynamics of the developmental process. The developmental paths
of tissues and cells are seen to be constrained or canalized to
`flow' along certain valleys and not others due to the `force'
exerted on the landscape by the various gene products which define
the fluid topography of the landscape.[7] This fluid topography
contains multiple potential developmental pathways that may be
realized as the result of "fluctuations", or if the environmental
conditions, the genes or gene products change. This metaphor has
been made much more explicit recently by mathematician Peter
Saunders (1992) who shows that the properties of the epigenetic
landscape are "common not just to developing organisms but to most
nonlinear dynamical systems."
The polychromatic organism
A particular kind of nonlinearity which has made headlines
recently is `deterministic chaos': a complex dynamical behaviour
that is locally unpredictable and irregular, which has been used
to describe many living functions including the collective
behaviour of ant colonies (see Goodwin, 1994). The unrepeatable
patterns of brain activities that persuaded Freeman (1995) to
declare brain science in crisis are typical of systems exhibiting
deterministic chaos. Another putative example is the heart beat,
which is found to be much more irregular in healthy people than in
cardiac patients.[8] Physiologist Goldberger (1991) came to the
conclusion that healthy heartbeat has "a type of variability
called chaos", and that loss of this "complex variability" is
associated with pathology and with aging. Similarly, the
electrical activities of the functioning brain, apart from being
unrepeatable from moment to moment, also contain many frequencies.
But during epileptic fits, the spectrum is greatly impoverished
(Kandel, Schwartz and Jessell, 1991). There is much current debate
as to whether these complex variabilities associated with the
healthy, functional state constitute chaos in the technical sense,
so the question is by no means settled (Glass and Mackey, 1988).
A different understanding of the complex activity spectrum of the
healthy state is that it is polychromatic (Ho, 1996c), approaching
`white' in the ideal, in which all the modes of energy storage are
equally represented. It corresponds to the so-called f(l) = const.
rule that Popp (1986) has generalized from the spectrum of light
or "biophotons" found to be emitted from all living systems. I
have proposed that this polychromatic ideal distribution of stored
energy is the state towards which all open systems capable of
energy storage naturally evolve (Ho, 1994b). It is a state of both
maximum and minimum in entropy content: maximum because energy
becomes equally distributed over all the space-time modes (hence
the `white' ideal), and minimum because the modes are all coupled
or linked together to give a coherent whole, in other words, to a
single degree of freedom (Popp, 1986; Ho, 1993). In a system where
there is no impedance to energy mobilization, all the modes are
intercommunicating and hence all the frequencies will be
represented. Instead, when coupling is imperfect, or when the
subsystem, say, the heart, or the brain, is not communicating
properly, it falls back on its own modes, leading to
impoverishment of its activity spectrum. Living systems are
necessarily a polychromatic whole, they are full of colour and
variegated complexity that nevertheless cohere into a singular
being.
The organism is a free sentient being
and hence able to decide its own fate
One distinguishing feature of the living system is its exquisite
sensitivity to weak signals. For example, the eye can detect
single photons falling on the retina, and the presence of several
molecules of pheromones in the air is sufficient to attract male
insects to their appropriate mates. That extreme sensitivity of
the organism applies to all levels and is the direct consequence
of its energy self-sufficiency. No part of the system has to be
pushed or pulled into action, nor be subjected to mechanical
regulation and control. Instead, coordinated action of all the
parts depends on rapid intercommunication throughout the system.
The organism is a system of "excitable media" (see Goodwin, 1994,
1995), or excitable cells and tissues poised to respond
specifically and disproportionately (i.e., nonlinearly) to weak
signals because of the large amount of energy stored, which can
thus amplify the weak signal into macroscopic action. It is by
virtue of its energy self-sufficiency, therefore, that an organism
is a sentient being -- a system of sensitive parts all set to
intercommunicate, to respond and to act appropriately as a whole
to any contingency.
The organism is indeed free from mechanical determinism, but it
does not thereby fall prey to indeterminacy. Far from surrendering
its fate to the indeterminacy of nonlinear dynamics (or quantum
theory, for that matter), the organism maximizes its opportunities
inherent in the multiplicity of futures available to it. I have
argued elsewhere that indeterminacy is really the problem of the
ignorance of the external observer, and not experienced by the
being itself, who has full knowledge of its own state, and can
readily adjust, respond and act in the most appropriate manner
(Ho, 1993). In a very real sense, the organism is free to decide
its own fate because it is a sentient being who has moment to
moment, up-to-date knowledge of its own internal milieu as well as
the external environment.
IV. The organism frees itself from mechanistic control
as an interconnected, intercommunicating whole
This idea has become very concrete as the result of recent
advances in biochemistry, cell biology and genetics. A molecular
democracy of distributed control
There are thousands of enzymes catalyzing thousands of energy
transactions and metabolic transformations in our body. The
product of one enzyme is acted on by one or more other enzymes,
resulting in a highly interconnected metabolic network. Henrik
Kacser (1987) was among the first to realize that once we have a
network, especially one as complicated as the metabolic network,
it is unrealistic to think that there could be special enzymes
controlling the flow of metabolites under all circumstances. He
and a colleague pioneered metabolic control analysis, to discover
how the network is actually regulated under different conditions.
After more than 20 years of investigation by many biochemists and
cell biologists, it is now generally recognized that so-called
`control' is invariably distributed over many enzymes (and
metabolites) in the network, and moreover, the distribution of
control differs under different conditions. The metabolic network
turns out to be a "molecular democracy" of distributed control.
Long-range energy continua in cells and tissues
Recent studies have also revealed that energy mobilization in
living systems is achieved by protein or enzyme molecules acting
as "flexible molecular energy machines" (see Ho, 1995a), which
transfer energy directly from the point of release to the point of
utilization, without thermalization or dissipation. These direct
energy transfers are carried out in collective modes extending
from the molecular to the macroscopic domain. The flow of
metabolites is channeled coherently at the molecular level, from
one enzyme to the next in sequence, in multi-enzyme complexes (see
Welch and Clegg, 1987). At the same time, high voltage electron
microscopy and other physical measurement techniques reveal that
the cell is more like a `solid state' than the `bag of dissolved
enzymes' that generations of biochemists had previously supposed
(Clegg, 1984). Not only are almost all enzymes bound to an
intricate "microtrabecular lattice", but a large proportion of
metabolites as well as water molecules are also structured on the
enormous surfaces available. Aqueous channels are now thought to
be involved in the active transport of solutes within the cell in
the same way that the blood stream transport metabolites and
chemical messengers within the organism (Wheatley and Clegg,
1991). Joseph Needham (1936) and his colleagues were already aware
of all that some sixty years ago.
As Welch and Berry (1985) propose, the whole cell is linked up by
"long-range energy continua" of mechanical interactions, electric
and eletrochemical fluxes and in particular, proton currents that
form a "protoneural network", whereby metabolism is regulated
instantly and down to minute detail. In addition, the possibility
that cells and tissues are also linked by electromagnetic phonons
and photons is increasingly entertained (see Popp, Li and Gu,
1992; Ho, 1993; Ho, Popp and Warnke, 1994). As I shall show later,
the cell (as well as organism) is not so much a "solid state" as
liquid crystalline. Living systems, therefore, possess just the
conditions that favour the rapid propagation of influences in all
directions, so that local and global can no longer be easily
distinguished. Global phase transitions may often take place,
which can be initiated at any point within the system or
subsystem. Freeman and Barrie (1994) have described abrupt,
phase-transition like changes that typically occur in the eeg of
whole areas of the brain, recorded simultaneously with a large
array of electrodes, for which no definite centre(s) of origin can
be identified.[9]
Organism and environment -- a mutual partnership
Biology today remains dominated by the genetic paradigm. Genes are
seen to be the repository of information that controls the
development of the organism, but are otherwise insulated from the
environment, and passed on unchanged to the next generation except
for rare random mutations. The much publicized Human Genome
Project is being promoted on that very basis.[10] Yet, the genetic
paradigm has already been fatally undermined at least ten years
ago, when a plethora of `fluid genome' processes were first
discovered, and many more have come to light since. These
processes destabilize and alter genes and genomes in the course of
development, some of the genetic changes are so well correlated
with the environment that they are referred to as "directed
mutations". Many of the genetic changes are then passed on to the
next generation. I pointed out at the time that heredity can no
longer be seen to reside solely in the DNA passed on from one
generation to the next. Instead, the stability and repeatability
of development -- which we recognize as heredity -- is distributed
in the whole gamut of dynamic feedback interrelationships between
organism and environment, from the socioecological to the genetic.
All these may leave imprints that are passed on to subsequent
generations, in the form of cultural traditions or artefacts,
maternal or cytoplasmic effects, gene expression states, as well
as genetic (DNA sequence) changes.
The organism is highly interconnected and intercommunicating at
all levels extending from within the cell to the socioecological
environment. It is on that account that the organism has freed
itself from mechanistic controls of any kind. It is not a passive
object at the mercy of random variation and natural selection, but
an active participants in the evolutionary drama.[11] In
constantly responding to and transforming its environment, it
partakes in creating the possible futures of generations to come.
V. The organism as an autonomous coherent whole
The concept of coherence has emerged within the past 20 years to
describe the wholeness of the organism. The first detailed theory
of coherence of the organism was presented by Herbert Fröhlich
(1968; 1980) who argued that as organisms are made up of strongly
dipolar molecules packed rather densely together (c.f. the `solid
state' cell), electric and elastic forces will constantly
interact. Metabolic pumping will excite macromolecules such as
proteins and nucleic acids as well as cellular membranes (which
typically have an enormous electric field of some 107V/m across
them). These will start to vibrate and eventually build up into
collective modes, or coherent excitations, of both phonons and
photons (sound and light) that extend over macroscopic distances
within the organism and perhaps also outside the organism. The
emission of electromagnetic radiation from coherent lattice
vibrations in a solid-state semi-conductor has recently been
experimentally demonstrated for the first time (Dekorsy et al,
1995). The possibility that organisms may use electromagnetic
radiations to communicate between cells was already entertained by
Soviet biologist Gurwitsch (1925) early this century.This
hypothesis was revived by Popp and his coworkers in the late
1970s, and there is now a large and rapidly growing literature on
"biophotons" that are believed to be emitted from a coherent
photon field (or energy storage field) within the living system
(see Popp, Li and Gu, 1992).
We have indeed found that a single, one minute, exposure of
synchronously developing early fruitfly embryos to white light
results in the re-emission of relatively intense and prolonged
flashes of light, some tens of minutes and even hours after the
light exposure (Ho et al, 1992b). This is reminiscent of
phase-correlated collective emission, or superradiance, in
physical systems, although the timescale is orders of magnitude
longer. For phase-correlation to build up over the entire
population, one must assume that each embryo has a collective
phase of all its activities, in other words, each embryo must be
considered a highly coherent domain, despite its multiplicity of
activities (Ho, Zhou and Haffegee, 1995). Actually, this is no
different from the macroscopic phase correlations that are
involved in the synchronous flashing of huge populations of
fireflies (Strogatz and Mirollo, 1988), and in many physiological
functions, such as limb coordination during locomotion (Collin and
Stewart, 1992; Kelso, 1991) and coupling between heart rate and
respiratory rate (Breithaupt, 1989). Under those conditions, whole
limbs or entire circulatory and respiratory systems must be
considered coherent domains which can maintain definite phase
relationships with respect to one another.
During the same early period of development in Drosophila,
exposure of the embryos to weak static magnetic fields also cause
characteristic global transformation of the normal segmental body
pattern to helical configurations in the larvae emerging 24 hours
later (Ho et al, 1992a). As the energies involved are well below
the thermal threshold, we conclude that there can be no effect
unless the external field is acting on a coherent field where
charges are moving in phase, or where magnetically sensitive
liquid crystals are undergoing phase alignment globally (Ho, et
al, 1994). Liquid crystals may indeed be the material basis of
many, if not all aspects of biological organization (Ho et al,
1996).
Organisms are polyphasic liquid crystals
Liquid crystals are phases of matter between the solid and the
liquid states, hence the term, mesophases (DeGennes, 1974). Liquid
crystalline mesophases possess long range orientational order (all
the molecules pointing in the same direction), and often also
varying degrees of translational order (the individual molecules
keep to their positions to varying extents). In contrast to solid
crystals, liquid crystals are mobile and flexible, and above all,
highly responsive. They undergo rapid changes in orientation or
phase transitions when exposed to electric or magnetic fields
(Blinov, 1983) or to changes in temperature, pressure, pH,
hydration, and concentrations of inorganic ions (Collings, 1990;
Knight, 1993). These properties are ideal for organisms (Gray,
1993; Knight, 1993). Liquid crystals in organisms include all its
major constituents; the lipids of cellular membranes, the DNA in
chromosomes, all proteins, especially cytoskeletal proteins,
muscle proteins, collagens and other macromolecules of connective
tissues. These adopt a multiplicity of different mesophases that
may be crucial for biological structure and function at all levels
of organization (Ho et al, 1996) from channeling metabolites in
the cell to pattern determination and the coordinated locomotion
of whole organisms.
The importance of liquid crystals for living organization was
recognized by Joseph Needham (1936) among others. He suggested
that living systems actually are liquid crystals, and that many
liquid crystalline mesophases may exist in the cell although they
cannot then be detected. Indeed, there has been no direct evidence
that extensive liquid crystalline mesophases exist in living
organisms or in the cytoplasm until our recent discovery of a
noninvasive optical technique (Ho and Lawrence, 1993; Ho and
Saunders, 1994; Newton, Haffegee and Ho, 1995). This enables us to
obtain high resolution and high contrast coloured images of live
organisms based on visualizing just the kind of coherent liquid
crystalline mesophases which Needham and others had predicted.
The technique effectively allows us to see the whole of the living
organism at once from its macroscopic activities down to the phase
alignment of the molecules that make up its tissues. Brilliant
optical colours are generated which are specific for each tissue,
dependent on the molecular structure and the degree of coherent
alignment of all the molecules, even as the molecules are moving
about busily transforming energy. This is possible because visible
light vibrates much faster than the molecules can move, so the
tissues will appear indistinguishable from static crystals to the
light passing through so long as the movements of the constituent
molecules are sufficiently coherent. With this imaging technique,
one can see that the organism is thick with activities at all
levels, which are coordinated in a continuum from the macroscopic
to the molecular. And that is what the coherence of the organism
entails.
These images also bring out another aspect of the wholeness of the
organism: all organisms, from protozoa to vertebrates without
exception, are polarized along the anteroposterior axis, so that
all the colours in the different tissues of the body are at a
maximum when the anteroposterior axis is appropriately aligned,
and they change in concert as the organism is rotated from that
position. The anteroposterior axis acts as the optical axis for
the whole organism, which behaves in effect, as a single crystal.
This leaves us in little doubt that the organism is a singular
whole, despite the diverse multiplicity and polychromatic nature
of its constituent parts.
The tissues not only maintain their crystalline order when they
are actively transforming energy, the degree of order seems to
depend on energy transformation, in that the more active and
energetic the organism, the more intensely colorful it is,
implying that the molecular motions are all the more coherent (Ho
and Saunders, 1994; Ho et al, 1996). The coherence of the organism
is therefore closely tied up with its energetic status, as argued
in the beginning of this essay: the coherent whole is full of
energy -- it is a vibrant coherent whole.
Quantum coherence in living organisms
The above considerations and observations show that the essence of
organic wholeness is that it is distributed throughout its
constituent parts so that local and global, part and whole are
completely indistinguishable -- the organism's activities being
always fully coordinated in a continuum from the molecular to the
macroscopic. That convinces me (as argued in detail in Ho, 1993,
also Ho, 1996a) that there is something very special about the
wholeness of organisms that is only fully captured by quantum
coherence.[12] An intuitive appreciation of quantum coherence is
to think of the `I' that each and every one of us experience of
our own being. We know that our body is a multiplicity of organs
and tissues, composed of many billions of cells and astronomical
numbers of molecules of many different kinds, all capable of
working autonomously, and yet somehow cohering into the singular
being of our private experience. That is just the stuff of quantum
coherence. Quantum coherence does not mean that everybody or every
element of the system must be doing the same thing all the time,
it is more akin to a grand ballet, or better yet, a very large
jazz band where everyone is doing his or her own thing while being
perfectly in step and in tune with the whole.
A quantum coherent system maximizes both global cohesion and local
freedom (Ho, 1993). This property is technically referred to as
factorizability, the correlations between subsystems resolving
neatly into self-correlations so that the subsystems behave as
though they are independent of one another. It enables the body to
be performing all sorts of different but coordinated functions
simultaneously (Ho, 1995b). It also enables instantaneous, as well
as noiseless intercommunication to take place throughout the
system.[13] As I am writing, my digestive system is working
independently, my metabolism busily transforming chemical energy
in all my cells, putting some away in the longer term stores of
fat and glycogen, while converting most of it into readily
utilizable forms such as ATP. Similarly, my muscles are keeping in
tone and allowing me to work the keyboard, while, hopefully, my
neurons are firing in wonderfully coherent patterns in my brain.
Nevertheless, if the telephone should ring in the middle of all
this, I would turn to pick it up without hesitation.
The importance of factorizability is evoked by the movie
character, Dr. Strangelove, portrayed by Peter Sellers as a
megalomaniac scientist who wanted to rule the world. He was a
wheelchair-bound paraplegiac, who could not speak without raising
his arm in the manner of a Nazi salute. That is just the symptom
of the loss of factorizability which is the hallmark of quantum
coherence.
The coherent organism is, in the ideal, a quantum superposition of
activities -- organized according to their characteristic
space-times -- each itself coherent, so that it can couple
coherently to the rest (Ho, 1995b; 1996a). This picture is fully
consistent with the earlier proposal that the organism stores
energy over all space-time domains each intercommunicating (or
coupled) with the rest. Quantum superposition also enables the
system to maximize its potential degrees of freedom so that the
single degree of freedom required for coherent action can be
instantaneously accessed.
The freedom of organisms
The organism maximizes both local freedom and global
intercommunication. One comes to the startling discovery that the
coherent organism is in a very real sense completely free. Nothing
is in control, and yet everything is in control. Thus, it is the
failure to transcend the mechanistic framework that makes people
persist in enquiring which parts are in control, or issuing
instructions; or whether free will exists, and who choreographs
the dance of molecules. Does "consciousness" control matter or
vice versa? These questions are meaningless when one understands
what it is to be a coherent, organic whole. An organic whole is an
entangled whole, where part and whole, global and local are so
thoroughly implicated as to be indistinguishable, and each part is
as much in control as it is sensitive and responsive.
Choreographer and dancer are one and the same. The `self' is a
domain of coherent activities, in the ideal, a pure state that
permeates the whole of our being with no definite localizations or
boundaries, as Bergson has described.
The positing of `self' as a domain of coherent activities implies
the existence of an active whole agent who is free. I must stress
that freedom does not entail the breakdown of causality as many
commentators have mistakenly supposed. On the contrary, an acausal
world would be one where it is impossible to be free, as nothing
would be intelligible. Nevertheless, freedom does entail a new
kind of organic causality that is nonlocal, and posited with the
organism itself. It is the experience of perceptual feedback
consequent on one's actions that is responsible for the intuition
of causality (Freeman, 1990). However, it must not be supposed
that the cause or consciousness is secreted from some definite
location in the brain, it is distributed and delocalized
throughout the system (c.f. Freeman, 1990).
Freedom in the present context means being true to `self', in
other words, being coherent. A free act is a coherent act. Of
course not all acts are free, as one is seldom fully coherent. Yet
the mere possiblity of being unfree affirms the opposite, that
freedom is real,
". . . we are free when our acts spring from our whole
personality, when they express it, when they have that
indefinable resemblance to it which one sometimes finds
between the artist and his work."[14]
The coherent `self' is distributed and nonlocal -- being
implicated in a community of other entities with which one is
entangled (Whitehead, 1925; see also Ho, 1993). Thus, being 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 (see Ho, 1996e). The coherent `self' can also couple
coherently to the environment so that one becomes as much in
control of the environment as one is responsive. The organism
thereby participates in creating its own possible futures as well
as those of the entire community of organisms in the universe,
much as Whitehead (1925) has envisaged.
I venture to suggest, therefore, that a truly free individual is a
coherent being that lives life fully and spontaneously, without
fragmentation or hesitation, who is at peace with herself and at
ease with the universe as she participates in creating, from
moment to moment, its possible futures.
Acknowledgments
An earlier draft of this paper was written for the occasion of the
6th Mind & Brain Conference, and I am grateful to Brian Goodwin
and Peter Fenwick for making it happen. Afterwards, I felt so
inspired by the discussions with the participants that I decided
to write it up for publication. Thanks are also due to Geoffrey
Sewell for stimulating discussions on coherence and bioenergetics
and for keeping track of my physics; to Peter Saunders, Brian
Goodwin, Michael Brown and Michael Clarke for their encouragement
and support, and for drawing my attention to crucial publications
and preprints. Invaluable suggestions for improving the manuscript
came from the reviewers, Walter Freeman and Joseph Goguen.
Notes
1. The Theoretical Biology Club was an informal association of
academics based in Cambridge University in the 1930s. Its
membership was probably more extensive than I have indicated
(see Mackay, 1994). Their project continued, to some extent,
in a series of meetings organized by C.H. Waddington in the
1960s and 70s. The proceedings, published under the
title,Towards a Theoretical Biology (Edinburgh University
Press) were very influential among critics of mainstream
neo-Darwinian theory of evolution, including myself. Four
recent Waddington Memorial Conferences have been organized by
Waddington's student, Brian Goodwin, and published as
collected volumes (see Goodwin and Saunders, 1989; Stein and
Varela, 1992). These helped to keep the project of the
Theoretical Biology Club alive, and I count myself among the
intellectual beneficiaries.
2. Cited in Ehrenber, 1967, p103.
3. Schrödinger, 1944, pp.70-71.
4. Schrödinger was criticized by both Pauling and Perutz over
his non-rigorous use of "negative entropy". The exchanges are
described by Gnaiger, 1994.
5. I explore the consequences of organic space-time for
understanding some of the more paradoxical "states of
consciousness" in my book (Ho, 1993) and also in a
forth-coming paper (Ho and Marcer, 1996).
6. The present conceptualization, based on thermodynamics,
converges with the notion of autopoesis describing the living
system as a unitary, self-producing entity, which Maturana
and Varela (1987) derived from purely formal considerations.
7. Waddington's ideas in evolutionary theory is reviewed
recently by Ho, 1996b.
8. This is comprehensively described by Goodwin (1995) in our
Open University Third Level Course and accompanying video.
9. Elsewhere, it is argued that nonlocal intercommunication
based on quantum coherence is involved in these simultaneous
changes in brain activities (Ho and Marcer, 1996).
10. I have dealt with the socioeconomic implications as well as
scientific issues of gene biotechnology and the Human Genome
Project elsewhere Ho (1995c).
11. My colleagues and I have written against the reductionist
tendencies of mainstream evolutionary theory since 1976, but
see in particular, Ho and Saunders (1984); Pollard, J.W.
(1984); Ho, M.W. (1986); Ho and Fox (1988). The issue of
epigenetic, or Lamarckian inheritance has been thoroughly
reviewed and documented recently by Jablonka and Lamb (1995).
See also, Ho, M.W. (1996d).
12. Some aspects of brain activity can best be understood in
terms of quantum coherence, independently of arguments given
by Hameroff and Penrose (1995) who offer a specific mechanism
for mediating coherence. The quantum coherence described in
the present paper involves the whole system. When the system
is coherent, nonlocal correlations can be established
instantaneously, i.e., without delay. The large-scale spatial
coherence of brain activities observed by Freeman and Barrie
(1994) may be indicative of such instantaneous
intercommunication. The relationship between quantum
coherence, organic space-time and conscious experience is the
subject of another paper (Ho and Marcer, 1996).
13. The coherent pure state (which is factorizable) is the
prerequisite for instantaneous, lossless intercommunication,
because the slightest change will give rise to a `signal'
passing between the uncorrelated factorizable parts. However,
during intercommunication, factorizability is temporarily
lost.
14. Bergson, 1916, p. 172.
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Legends
Figure 1. Energy flow, energy storage and the reproducing
life-cycle.
Figure 2. The many-fold cycles of life coupled to energy
flow.
Figure 3. The organism frees itself from the contraints of
energy conservation and the second law of thermodynamics.
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