On Jan 6, 2021, at 1:50 AM, Brian Josephson <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > wrote:
On 5 Jan 2021, at 23:40, JACK SARFATTI <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > wrote:
D854E508-3460-4E1B-89B1-A375918149AC@home" class=""><From quantum chemistry to quantum biology_ a path toward consciousness.pdf>
This paper presents strong examples of how orthodox quantum mechanics goes a long way in explaining exquisite complex biological mechanisms without any need for radically un-conservative New Age reformulations.
People working in biosemiotics and coordination dynamics, which are the tools we use, would be surprised to have their ideas characterised as New Age! All that is new is that we apply them in the context of fundamental physics, noting that these organisational principles can apply in that context as well.
Feynman it was I believe who noted the incomprehensibility of QM:
"I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.”
Jack: What Feynman really meant is that nobody understand the Copenhagen Interpretation. The Bohm pilot wave picture as updated by Roderick Sutherland explains everything. If I am mistaken, give me examples. What quantum phenomenon cannot be explained in the modern Bohm pilot wave theory?
Making biological organisation the basis would be an advance on that: it is admittedly complicated, but not incomprehensible in the same way.
Jack: Brian have you read this review paper? Very impressive.
PS my PQM is only a slight tweaking of QM extending QM from closed systems to pumped open systems using battle-tested concepts developed by Prigogine, Frohlich and others.
I find it interesting that you invoke similar ideas to ours in your PQM.
Jack: I have been pushing the action-reaction idea since 1994 now fully developed in the “particle” case by Sutherland, when I learned about it in Bohm-Hiley “Undivided Universe” in what Arthur Koestler called “Library Angel”. The book had just come out and I was browsing in “A Clean Well Lighted Place for Books” at Opera Plaza in San Francisco. I opened the book “randomly” and the first thing I saw was that “the wave function has no sources” violation of wave-particle action-reaction and this is why the Born probability rule is stable in time given that it is postulated initially i.e. local conservation of probability current. I immediately related this to the generation of conscious qualia assuming that the physical mind field is a giant coherent (analog to superfluid helium) pilot wave with classical level electrical signals being the “particle” as Mike Towler in 2010 summarized here
https://casinoqmc.net/PWT/lectures/bohm8.pdf slides 25, 31.
I spoke about this in 1996 at Hameroff’s Tucson II. It took until 2015 for Rod Sutherland to properly formulate it relativistically including Yakir Aharonov’s locally retrocausal “weak measurements” with two independent “destiny” and “history” pilot waves. (See also Huw Price’s papers). Antony Valentini in 2002 showed explicitly how action-reaction causes EPR signaling - vital to consciousness in my view. Valentini made an error - we have no need for the “sub-quantum level” of Vigier. It’s the classical level shown explicitly in Sutherland’s Lagrangian method already clear in Bohm’s 1952 papers though Bohm himself got muddled on that point later on.
Pilot wave is a concept parallel to semiosis
Jack: How exactly? Your statement is incomprehensible without further justification.
(a 19th century development, I might add, hardly New Age), as signs do similar things, i.e. they direct activity. You talk of back-action, again a biological concept, while Prigogine talked of the emergence of structure, and complexity. ‘Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery’, they say.
Jack: Not “imitation” as I was not at all aware of your thinking on this in 1994. I did know Prigogine and was his guest in Brussels in 1974 with Jagdish Mehra who I met at Abdus Salam’s ICTP in Trieste.
The point you seem to be missing is that you don’t need to assume QM to get these things to happen, dissipative open systems are the essential point, plus the tendency for code systems to emerge (the latter is referred to in my recent lecture 'Going beyond the present physics paradigm’, which is on line).
Jack: Dissipative open systems are essential, but you have no math for them in your “theory” also lately you only talk about “organized fluctuations” in thermodynamic equilibrium that I think is a false idea. Fluctuations in thermodynamic equilibrium are random. You have not made any plausible argument how they “organize."