Relationships and Causation in Living Matter: Reframing Some Methods in Life Sciences?

Authors: Renati P*

DOI: 10.23880/psbj-16000217

Volume 6, Issue 2

Abstract

In this paper I want to enrich, on the methodological and epistemological side, an earlier review of mine (in which there are more details on the physics of electrodynamic coherence), aiming to stimulate attention to some seemingly trivial or irrelevant aspects, but, in my opinion, very subtle and of crucial importance in the study of living dynamics in various disciplines (physics, biology, medicine, philosophy of science). The conceptual core is: to understand that a living system cannot be conceived, and therefore neither studied, as “an object”, “a body.” The (in essence) relational nature of the living being finds its foundations in dissipation, symmetry breakings and field theories capable to count for multiple levels of vacuum (such as Quantum Field Theory, QFT), and sees the living phase of condensed matter (on an aqueous basis) as a consequence of bosonic condensation of correlation quanta (the well-known Nambu-Goldstone bosons) over an extended and interrelated hierarchy of degrees of freedom to which a (super)coherent is associated state. In there the matter and energy components of the biological system are subjected to phase correlations to give rise to a holo-state, shared over the whole system, from which a self, endowed with continuity, emerges and thus also a biological identity rooted in a dissipative thermodynamic history. However, this “identity” is like the river of Heraclitus’ anecdote: it is a flow and not an object existing in itself, nor static; dynamics, change, are all that lasts, while water, is always different. So holds for an organism that is, in fact, an organizationally closed system, but (and precisely because) thermodynamically open. This condition implies that the study of any biological system is de facto the study of a flow of relationships, and the living system (whether a cell, a complex organism, or an ecosystem) should be conceived as a process dissipatively coupled to its environment and as a producer of responses following an autopoietic order, inherent in the very condition of coherence (as long as it exists). Once this is recognized: 

Keywords: Emergent properties; Complexion; Physical reduction; Symmetry breaking; Bosonic condensation; Electrodynamic coherence; Stimulus-response relationships; Semantics; Teleology; Causality; Biological sense

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