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Special Papers
Foundations For An Axiological Science
Hartman's Science Realized
By Norm Hirst
Life before matter, possible signification before tangible signs: Toward a Mediating View
By Floyd Merrell
The Dynamical View of Natural Form
By T. Irwin and S. Baxter
What is Life? - Part I |
Towards a science of life as creative organisms
By Norm Hirst Published in Cosmos and History - The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy
See Editors Summary ~ Arran Gare's Description Of Placement, What Is Life? ~ Click Here
Abstract: There is a paradigm shift occurring. The transition underway is from a rigid, mechanistic, and materialistic worldview to a process organismic worldview supporting a foundation of interconnectedness, cooperation, and the intersection of science and spirituality. A new paradigm must start with abductive hypotheses. I present the following as a presentation of abductive hypotheses. In semiotics abduction is a kind of reverse deduction to discover a law or some factor that would render some phenomenon intelligible. (Most of Sherlock Holmesís so-called deductions were abductions.) The importance of abduction is that it is creative; it escapes the confines of deduction and induction. In this paper we’re not putting forth claims of truth or arguments for a position, but we are putting forth claims of usefulness; what do we need to be investigating to support this new paradigm? …it is possible, not only for the manifest level of ordinary experience, but for the quantum level underlying it, to emerge from a deeper implicate level in which the classical Cartesian notions of form, order and structure have more or less dissolved …this suggestion is close to one that has been under consideration recently by physicists, i.e., that of ‘pre-space’ …[1]
Life means the organizing principles that are creating all forms of life. I shall talk of the “laws of life” referring to the laws by which organisms function. There will be many differences of details but throughout there will be organizing principles that characterize life and life as organism. All forms of life are organisms and they obey universals. It is our hypotheses that on every hierarchal level in living entities, the same kind of processes will occur and can be recognized as universal living processes; organismic. These principles obey very different kinds of logic than that known in the scientific materialism of physics. The material world can be accounted for by induction and deduction, but in the world of life and organisms abduction is also required. Bear in mind as we go, the subject of this paper cannot be approached in the old style of simulation by computation. Section I: Life as fundamental and creative, not matterLife is fundamental and creative, and creativity is supported by abduction. Abduction is the logic of creativity. So why don’t we say that? We don’t say that because, given scientific materialism, we think matter is fundamental and everything has to be reduced to matter. Reinforcing that idea, normal logic only has the procedures of deduction and induction; that is all that is needed for thinking about matter. Unlike matter, with organisms being self-initiating, self-acting and creating, abduction is required.It is not hard to say what life is. It is hard to understand what life is. It is as if trying to describe a new theater production by elaborating the facts. Begin by describing the stage scene and the physical movement of the actors around the stage. Something is missing. That something is meaning. That something is what theater critics will write about, and they might not even mention the fact details. What makes “life is creative” hard to understand is the dominance of a materialistic worldview as described by Whitehead: Thus in framing cosmological theory, the notion of continuous stuff with permanent attributes, enduring without differentiation, and retaining its self-identity through any stretch of time however small or large, has been fundamental. The stuff undergoes change in respect to accidental qualities and relations; but it is numerically self-identical in its character of one actual entity throughout its accidental adventures. The admission of this fundamental metaphysical concept has wrecked the various systems of pluralistic realism.[3]This might be metaphysics for a world of rocks. Indeed, considering the efforts that have gone into discovering the origin of life, I believe we do think in terms of rocks. It has been claimed that life began by accident when lightening hit a pond of chemicals ultimately producing life on earth. This myth has perpetuated the search of space for signs that such accidents may have happened elsewhere. Could there be life on other planets? Hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon are fundamental constituents of life as we experience it. We look where these are available in the right combination. So much for life being fundamental! Indeed, considering the efforts that have gone into discovering the origin of life I believe it hasn’t occurred because life is fundamental. That pond of chemicals must have had some kind of predisposition toward life if they were to come alive by a lightening strike. The question should be how does matter arise from life? Life is creative, but everything in flux would simply be chaos. As a ground for building order, life takes on habit, over-powering habit. The result is matter, entities that no longer are capable of self-acting. There is more to reality than we knew. Could there be living patterns of energy? Is there a biofield in pre-space creating matter? Let us consider some evidence beginning with the electronic environment within living organisms, as we know themResearch in biophysics has discovered that living organisms are not simply matter. I do remember years ago when some computer folks, in pursuit of artificial intelligence, argued that machines could do anything people could do since people are just meat machines; now biophysics shows that is not true. In 1992 liquid crystalline living tissue was discovered in the laboratories of biophysicist, Mae Wan Ho.[4] Our bodies consist of trillions of cells all connected through a living matrix of liquid crystalline tissue supporting proton jump conduction; a flow so fast that all cells are acting simultaneously. Thus our bodies, as with all living organisms, function holistically as a single unity. Functioning as a single unity is a characteristic of organisms. If it functions as a collection of parts, it’s not an organism. If it functions as a single holistic unity, it is an organism. Appearances to the contrary, there are no parts. The “parts” are so integral to the whole that they cannot exist - they cannot be the same thing - when separated from the whole. Before the discovery of the living matrix of liquid crystalline tissue, it was thought that the only signaling flow was the electron flow in the nervous system lending credence that the body is composed of organs as parts. The electron flow was too slow for everything to be functioning in a single unity. It is now said that the body is powered by electricity for electron flow and proticity for proton flow with all the cells functioning in simultaneity of unity. To learn about life, it had been thought we should turn to biology. Biology should be to health care what physics is to engineering. Unfortunately, below is the condition of biology today as described by Robert Rosen.[5] The question “What is life?” is not often asked in biology, precisely because the machines metaphor already answers it: “Life is a machine.” Indeed to suggest otherwise is regarded as unscientific and viewed with the greatest hostility as an attempt to take biology back to metaphysics.Biophysicist and biochemist, Szent Gyorgi, points out that metabolism works only with reactions that are statistically improbable. Since the reactions are improbable, it takes some form of catalyst to keep them going. This is done by internal meta-stable energy flows. Their stability has to be maintained by oxygen. If their stability disintegrates, the reactions of the body will stop working. That is why we can only last several minutes without breathing. This may be stating what seems obvious; however, it shows the importance of maintaining internal energy flows in life. For years I have said there is no similarity between computers and living organisms such as people. Now I see there is one. Computers are matter, hardware. They cannot do anything until a program is installed in memory. When the power is turned off, the program disappears. Once again the computer cannot do anything. What is a computer program anyway? It is called software. It is not matter. It is not a thing. We might think of it as a ghost in the machine. Actually a program is a well-ordered set of codes. In the computer they can be read in order to trigger an internal act by the computer. When a computer is turned off, the hardware can be studied forever without ever revealing a clue as to how it does what it is known to be capable of. When a living organism is dead, the energy fields and flows inside disappear. The “hardware of the body” can be studied forever without revealing a clue as to what life is. Mathematical biologist, Robert Rosen and biophysicist (discoverer of Vitamin C) Szent Gyorgi point out that biology of the past is more like physics. That biology has led to the study of structure where we wind up with nothing but misleading guesses as to what processes are going on. Now, electronic biology has been discovered. The living energy structure in our bodies is electronic and biophoton energy flows. To quote biophysicist and biochemist, Szent Gyorgi: There is a basic difference between physics and biology. Physics is the science of probabilities. If a process goes 999 times one way, and only once another way, the physicist will not hesitate to call the first the way. Biology is the science of the improbable and I think it is on principle that the body works only with reactions that are statistically improbable. If metabolism were built of a series of probable and thermodynamically spontaneous reactions, then we would burn up and the machine would run down as a watch does if deprived of its regulators. The reactions are kept in hand by being statistically improbable and made possible by specific tricks that may then be used for regulation. So, for the living organism, reactions are possible which may seem impossible, or at least, improbable to the physicist…. If Nature wants to do something she will find a way to do it if there is no contradiction to basic rules of Nature. She has time to do so. (Living Nature also often works with more complex systems than the physicist uses for testing his theories.)[6]The last paragraph it Szent Gyorgi’s book on sub molecular biology states: In an earlier chapter I emphasized the biological importance of “organization,” by which I meant that if Nature puts two things together a new structure is born which can no more be described in terms of the qualities of it components. The same holds also for functions. In living systems the various functions, too, seem to integrate into higher units. We will really approach the understanding of life when all structure and functions, all levels, from the electronic to the supramolecular, will merge into one single unit. Until then our distinguishing between structure and function, classic chemical reactions and quantum mechanics, or the sub- and supramolecular, only shows the limited nature of our approach and understanding.[7]It used to be that the only way biologists could study living organisms was to cut up dead ones and study the material structure. Then following what they thought was a proper scientific protocol, reductionism, process them down to the smallest particles. Biology as it has been known is a dead end. Mae Wan Ho says: I do not think quantum theory per se will lead us through the mechanistic deadlock to further understanding. Instead, we need a thoroughly organicist way of thinking that transcends both conventional thermodynamics and quantum theory.[8]The scientific materialism worldview of “matter as a fundamental reality” does not work. The idea of “matter being fundamental” has led us astray. Matter doesn’t do anything. It is non-active, but acted on. Matter is rearranged by cause and effect. It comes down to mechanisms. It is useful to distinguish between entities that are autonomic, obeying self-law and entities that are allonomic, obeying non-self law. We have been led astray by our experience of obedient things. In dealing with living autonomic self-acting entities it may come as a surprise that they do what they want with no thought of obedience. In the case of quantum theory, I wonder if relational quantum theory isn’t pointing to an organismic creative reality. If so, then quantum theory won’t be separate from an organicist point of view, but it will be reinterpreted to be seamless with the organicist point of view. Similarly, conventional thermodynamics will be enlarged to account for the way living entities manage energy. And it will be seen that the second law of thermodynamics does not apply to living organisms. What was not considered in physics is the contribution that organisms could initiate their own acts. In organisms, their acts can create new forms of order. Thus organisms do not approach reality in a machine-like fashion; always limited to the current context of order. Living entities must change and adapt constantly to evolving forms of order. An organism is not calculating, and second of all, it is connected to the requirements of its environment. Living organisms must live in an organismic environment to function. Organisms function to conform to coherence conditions imposed by their environment while co-creating coherent acts through internal processes that individuate and add their uniqueness to the whole. Thus organisms have a Janus character. Janus was a Roman God with a double-faced head, each looking in opposite directions at the same time. An organism is looking both to its own unique experiences while sensing what also can be unique contextual conditions of the moment. Thus to develop their unique contributions, organisms must harmonize this reality and that is accomplished through the use of inherent value intelligence. I have found that this requires values as guiding force, as opposed to cause and effect. More on that in section III. Now given the discoveries in physics, the Dirac Sea, and biophysics, and the electronic inner environment of living organisms, I don’t think it would be outrageous to suggest that our being alive is due to energy flows. We can no longer assume that physics will help us understand life. Section II: The characteristics of life as organisms and organismic functioningThe following provides beginning subject matter to be addressed by new philosophy of organism; the characteristics and properties of organisms that must be accounted for in new organism philosophy and formalisms.Life requires a science that deals with the improbable. In the observation of living processes, we see that Life does not function in any of the ways traditionally thought. I propose the development of such a philosophy, with accompanying logic based on process metaphysics. Process metaphysics will provide the organizing principles by which life works to manifest and maintain organisms. Philosopher Nicholas Rescher provides contrasting descriptions of Substance Philosophy and Process Philosophy.[9] As we examine organisms as life, consider how Process Metaphysics is more characteristic of life than Substance Metaphysics (upon which physics as been founded).
Characteristics of Organisms
Requirements of Organisms
Recent Empirical Philosophy about Organisms
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