Quantum Biology and the Puzzle of Coherence

[tama]

24. First

thank you for ignoring perceived ad hominems.

Discussing causality philosophy cannot be avoided, nor history. I hope you bear with me as deeply ingrained ideas can be hard to let go as prerequisite to be able to think well about some other ideas, as I try my best to explain my current state of understanding.

It remains unclear what you mean by "quantum causality" and especially "bottom-up-such", when in fact you seem to be still talking about notion of causality in newtonian mechanics - which goes back to ancient atomists such as Democritus.

That kind of causality is not per se proven or empirically provable, as Hume pointed out, but a basic premisse of standard/classical physics, on which the standards of proof are built upon. Ideas about causality are dependent from notions of time.

Classic example of change in notion of time - and hence also causality - in physics is paradigm shift from absolute time in euclidean space of newtonian mechanics to relativistic time-space in non-euclidean riemannian manifolds (Einsteins theory as 4D Minkowski space). IIRC I read from Lee Smolin's popular book that the difficulties of combining general relativity with quantum mechanics arose from the latter being approached from the notion of absolute linear time inherent in newtonian mechanics, but in n-dimensional generalisation of euclidean space called Hilbert space defined as complete space with inner product. My math abilities are on the stretch here, but it is noteworthy that Minkowski space of Einsteins space-time has no inner product or indefinite inner product (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner_product_space#The_Minkowski_inner_product).

Later partially succesfull combinations of quantum mechanics and relativity or "GUT"s such as Quantum electrodynamics have led to Feynmann diagrams where vectors called "propability amplitudes" go also backwards in time.

Hopefully this short excursion into history is sufficient to show that the basic notions of causality and time have allready changed quite a lot between the three theories mentioned - Newton, Relativity and QED, and search for empirically and logically sound TOE demands further changes. Especially if the TOE does not exclude life and consciousness, as it of course shouldn't.

Again, any notion of causality and time is not something that can be put under a microscope and directly verified, but presuppositions on which theories are build upon. And theoretical breakthroughs such as the three mentioned before require letting go of previous generally accepted notions of causality and time in order to find more general notions that allow to explain wider area of phenomena and/or combine theories allready as wide as relativity and QM.

Now, what kind of notions of time and causality are needed for a theory that can also explain itself - e.g. mathematical imaginations such as Minkowski space, Hilbert space, Feynman diagrams etc., that allow mathematical physicists to create thought experiments that pragmatic experimentalists can ask nature for empirical verifications and falsifications?

As said above in other post, Darwinian evolution presupposes complex physical environment that biological evolution adapts to - in top down manner. And only way that universe can include change and have life and evolution is that a participant observes a change - between this and that decoherred classical state. As decoherence does not presuppose collapse of wave function, and being conscious means being conscious of change between classical states, most natural and simple answer is that consciousness is quantum jump between classical states.