Electrodynamic Coherence as a Physical Basis for Emergence of Perception, Semantics, and Adaptation in Living Systems

Abstract

Despite the successes earned in cataloguing and finding the role of the most of molecular components in living matter, the “biochemical and molecular” perspective, popular in biology, medicine and genetics, is unable to give account for crucial topics as the faculty of living systems to “feel”, to “perceive” what a given stimulus implies (means, indeed) for their survival. Condensed matter physics too, if bounded to a local, short-range, and perturbative approach, fails dramatically. This is also due to the role commonly assigned to water – actually the main constituent of living matter – deemed for long time to be merely chemical (as “solvent” or a reactant/product). Nonetheless, today many evidences show how living matter can be right conceived as a super-structured coherent water-based matrix, suggesting that the characterization of bio(electro)chemical and physical processes undertaken at molecular level in living matter, would let us unable to answer a question like this: what allows an amoeba, moreover without any neurons, to “know” to get closer to a nutrient or escape away from a toxin? I propose that to pursue such a fundamental inquiry it’s necessary an essentially relational approach, that is: to consider the living being at its grounding as the outcome of a physical history of relationships where symmetry-breakings, dissipation and coherence yield the emergence of the living state of matter, conceivable only as a time-dependent open process, and not as a portraited “body”. The effective tools to build up such an approach may be retrieved in far-from-equilibrium thermodynamics (TD), symmetry-breakings and gauge-fields theory, science of complexity, within the framework of a Quantum Field Theory. Indeed, within a field-view of matter, and of water especially, as it has been developed by a Quantum Electrodynamic (QED) description of condensed matter, it’s possible to give account for a physical basis too such an epistemologically elusive, though crucial, feature of living systems (i.e.: perception and meaning). The emerging landscape allows some important meditations about adaptation, evolution, ecodynamics, and about different conceptions of complexity and “information” in living realm. Furthermore, some neuroscientific themes like consciousness, qualia and their links to artificial intelligence could be supplied with due insights.

Untitled

“…In quantum field theory, the difference between wave and particle mitigates as a particle is an excitation of the quantum field that fills all the space. Other differences such as substance and form, structure and function, and matter and information also vanish (Renati, 2020;Vitiello, 2001). Molecules themselves become ordered electromagnetic structures (Bischof and Del Giudice, 2013;Cosic, 1994;Cosic, 1997).…”

“…Quantum coherence is the only known tool of physical phenomena that provides long-range, i.e., macroscopic, correlations out of the microscopic dynamics of elementary components (Vitiello, 2012). Such microscopic quantum dynamics give rise to macroscopic dynamic properties, such as growth/formation, morphogenesis, bioenergetics, organization, and autopoiesis (Renati, 2020).…”

“…Moreover, biological information can be in the configuration rooted in relationships. These relationships are not "invariants and depend on the context, the history and the specific perceiver" (Renati, 2020).…”

“…Morphogenesis is the coming-into-being of living organisms (Coen, 2012). The electromagnetic fields and radiation play a leading role in morphogenesis (Renati, 2020;Bischof and Del Giudice, 2013;Levin, 2012;Rouleau and Dotta, 2014;Bischof, 1994). Goodwin (1987Goodwin ( , 2020 and Goodwin et al (1987) have argued strongly in their favor since the 1980s that they cannot be overlooked in biological operations.…”

“…Self-organization is typically defined as the evolution of a system into an organized form without external pressures (Prokopenko, 2009). However, the biological system is permanently coupled with the external environment (Renati, 2020;Maturana and Mpodozis, 2000;Maturana and Varela, 1987). Thus, life would have been compelled to respond or react to environmental stressors.…”