Of Flesh and Ghosts

Stuart Kaufman's At Home in the Universe, The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity (AHU) (Oxford, 1995) is a popularization of his The Origins of Order. Kaufman's new idea is that Darwinian natural selection from random variations while necessary is not sufficient to explain evolution. There is also a spontaneous self-organizing mechanism. This idea is compatible with the extension of quantum mechanics to post-quantum mechanics based upon the Bohm interpretation. While other interpretations, such as Penrose's and Stapp's, give corresponding results, the connection of the latter to Kaufman's "spontaneous self-organization" is not as immediately transparent as it is in Bohm's version.

Kaufman says that though "Creation Science" is wrong, the Christian Fundamentalists who believe in it have the valid motivation to restore a sense of the sacred in modern culture. Simple Darwinism, poignantly and depressingly expressed in a famous essays by Bertrand Russell, Jean Paul Sartre and hordes of anguished Existentialists, makes that impossible. Kauffman writes:

"Darwin devastated this world. .... Evolution left us stuck on the earth with no ladder to climb, contemplating our fate as nature's Rube Goldberg machines. Random variation, selection-sifting. Here is the core, the root. Here lies the brooding sense of accident, of historical contingency, of design by elimination. ... We humans, a trumped-up, tricked-out, horn-blowing, self-important presence on the globe, need never have occurred. So much for our pretensions; we are lucky to have our hour. So much, too, for paradise." (p.7)

I am reminded of a song in Gilbert and Sullivan's Princess Ida, whose theme was Darwinism in which "a maid of lineage high, was loved by an ape in the days gone by, the maid was radiant as the Sun, the ape was a most unsightly one...":

Fortunately there is a silver lining behind this grim Darwinian cloud -- simple Darwinism is not enough!

"I shall argue in this book that this idea is wrong. For, as we shall see, the emerging sciences of complexity begin to suggest that the order is not at all accidental, that vast veins of spontaneous order lie at hand." (p.8)

It is my thesis that the fundamental physical mechanism behind Kauffman's bold hypothesis is an extension of quantum mechanics to a new "post-quantum mechanics". The seeds for this extension can be found in Bohm's final work with Basil Hiley, The Undivided Universe (UU) (Routledge, 1993).

Bohm's idea is that the world, at least in the low-energy limit relevant to biology, divides into two real or "ontological parts" that I will call "beables" and "pilot-waves" (aka "quantum field"). The beables are essentially both the particles, electromagnetic and gravitational fields of classical physics up to the end of the 19th century. These classical gauge fields should not be confused with the quantum fields (aka the pilot-waves) which are qualitatively different. We can also add the weak and strong gauge fields of the standard model of elementary particles on the beable side of the ledger. The beables, under certain approximate conditions, do accurately behave like a reductionistic mechanical machine in which the whole is not more than the sum of its parts. This is the classical level where the influence of the pilot-waves are negligible. Things are qualitatively different at the quantum level. The beables are objects in ordinary three-dimensional space, the pilot-waves not. They span two new kinds of spaces called Hilbert space and configuration space. There are faster-than-light "nonlocal connections" which do exert "spooky telepathic" actions-at-a-distance connecting widely separated parts into a whole greater than their simple sum. Kauffman still thinks of an "emergent" self-organizing order, but Bohm has something much more profound. Einstein's relativity is only valid at the classical level. It is not valid for individual quantum events. Nevertheless, these nonlocal connections cannot be used for practical faster-than-light signaling or "nonlocal communication" because of a very peculiar fact about standard, or "orthodox", quantum mechanics which is:

"... unlike what happens with Maxwell's equations for example, the Schrodinger equation for the quantum field does not have sources, nor does it have any other way by which the field could be directly affected by the conditions of the particles. This of course constitutes an important difference between quantum fields and other fields that have thus far been used." p. 30

Here is a key sentence, note the use of the word "completely":

"As we shall see, however, the quantum theory can be understood completely in terms of the assumption that the quantum field has no sources or other forms of dependence on the particles. We shall in ... section 14.6, go into what it would mean to have such dependence and we shall see that this would imply that the quantum theory is an approximation with a limited domain of validity." p. 30

Such a source of the quantum field would violate conservation of quantum probability current in the 3n dimensional configuration space of n point particles in an entangled quantum state, for example. This conservation for the probability current flow is the key assumption used in Eberhard's theorem which forbids nonlocal communication in quantum mechanics. The quantum fields of post-quantum mechanics have such sources which I call "backactivity". These post-quantum fields are intrinsically self-organizing the way Kauffman needs them to be. I hope to make this clear below. In section 14.6 "Extension of our approach beyond the domain of current quantum theory" Bohm and Hiley introduce the idea of "post-quantum backactivity", though they do not use that name for the idea. Thus,:

"Other changes ... that might be considered would be to ... introduce terms that would relate the Schrodinger wave function to the particle positions. (Again in such a way that significantly new results would follow only in new domains not yet investigated.)" p. 345

Bohm had short distances in mind. However, the new domain will involve the larger mesoscopic distances where carbon-based life is found. Bohm and Hiley continue:

"One way to make Schrodinger's equation dependent on the particle positions (so that there would be a two-way relationship between wave and particle) can be seen by considering equation (14.1). In this equation, we can regard Rn as the actual position of the nth particle. From the same arguments as apply to the GRW approach, it would follow that the overall wave function would tend to 'collapse' toward the actual particle positions, so that, in a large scale system, the empty wave packets of our interpretation would tend to disappear." p. 346

The key words for Kauffman's spontaneous non-random self-organization, upon which random Darwinian natural selection operates, is the "two-way relationship between wave and particle". To get the new idea I am trying to get across, one must clearly understand that orthodox quantum mechanics, with its irreducible randomness and its Eberhard theorem forbidding nonlocal communication, is based upon a one-way relationship of wave acting on its attached particle, i.e. the Bohm quantum force -- not the two-way relationship that defines post-quantum mechanics. This two-way relationship is the fundamental adaptive feedback-control loop for Kauffman's spontaneous self-organization. To see this more clearly requires understanding the idea of the "fitness landscape" and how Bohm's quantum potential provides it. One must also understand what physically differentiates living matter from non-living matter.

There is no actual collapse in a quantum measurement in Bohm's version of orthodox quantum mechanics. Rather it is "collapse without collapse". However, there is an ontological collapse in the post-quantum mechanics with the two-way relationship in which Bohm's quantum force is balanced by backactivity. Thus, Bohm's approach meets both Stapp's and Penrose's ontological collapse models. Penrose uses the term "orchestrated" which suggests self-organization, but it is only in Bohm's version that we have a clear intuitive visualizable understanding of why there should be such "orchestration". The orchestration is from the "two-way relationship between wave and particle". On the other hand, there is nothing in Bohm's version that demands Penrose's link of "orchestration" to quantum gravity with the emission of a single graviton. The work of Lee Smolin, Ashtekar and others suggests that Penrose's idea of a "single graviton" is an artifact only of an inappropriate perturbation theory and that a non-perturbative quantum gravity theory will not have wavy quanta like photons as all the current popular books suggest, but will rather have stringy one-dimensional beables at the Planck scale of 10^-33 cm. It is not yet at all clear if non-perturbative quantum gravity, when completed, will invalidate Penrose's criterion that our inner felt experiences depend upon an ontological self-collapse of the wave function of a microtubule network subsystem triggered by single graviton emission breaking the coherent quantum superposition of alternative spacetime geometries. For details of Penrose's idea see The Large, the Small and the Human Mind (Oxford, 1997).

Consider the problem on faster-than-light "nonlocal communication". Bohm and Hiley write:

"For several centuries, there has been a strong feeling that nonlocal theories are not acceptable in physics. It is well known, for example, that Newton felt very uneasy about action-at-a-distance and that Einstein regarded it as spooky. One can understand this feeling, but if one reflects deeply and seriously on this subject one can see nothing basically irrational about such an idea. Rather it seems to be most reasonable to keep an open mind on the subject and therefore allow oneself to explore this possibility. If the price of avoiding nonlocality is to make an intuitive explanation impossible, one has to ask whether the cost is not too great.

The only serious objection we can see to nonlocality is that, at first sight, it does not seem to be compatible with relativity, because nonlocal connections in general would allow a transmission of signals faster than the speed of light. ... we extend the causal interpretation to a relativistic context and show that although nonlocality is still present, it does not introduce any inconsistencies into the the theory, e.g. it does not imply that we can use the quantum potential to transmit a signal faster-than-light." pp.57-58

Let me comment on this. "Relativity" in the above context splits into two logically independent pieces, i.e. the causal structure and the symmetry structure. The "retarded" causal structure is the axiom that no signals can propagate outside the forward light cone. In particular, this implies that it is impossible for advanced influences to propagate backward in time from future to past. Such advanced influences are part of both the transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics by John Cramer and Yakir Aharonov's "two state vector" interpretation where the present is co-determined by both past and future influences. I use the word "influences" instead of "signals". All signals are influences but not vice versa. A signal has the additional property that it can be locally decoded at the receiver without needing additional bits from the sender. A superluminal signal can also be used to violate the classical limit of the second law of thermodynamics. This was shown by Asher Peres. Note I use the term "classical limit" because the second law of thermodynamics has surprising consequences in the quantum regime. For example, if you connect a hot negative temperature spin system to a cold positive temperature lattice, the resulting quantum reversible Carnot engine will totally convert random heat energy, from both hot and cold reservoirs, to coherent useful work. This is greater than 100% efficiency. The symmetry structure is that of the Lorentz transformations between inertial frames moving uniformly relative to each other at subluminal velocities. These subluminal frame shifts can consistently describe the motion of classical tachyon signals outside the light cone. It is, therefore, as shown by Sudarshan and Feinberg, possible to have a limited or crippled form of special relativity with violation of retarded causality. Time dilation, the equivalence of mass to energy and all other effects of special relativity tested by current experiments would still be valid in the crippled form. Dispersion relations that supposedly test retarded causality in strong interactions invariably have fudge factors and so the experiments cannot be trusted. Dispersion relations on light scattering from electrons are not relevant to the current problem.

Bohm and Hiley explain, within their picture, why Eberhard's theorem forbidding quantum superluminal signals works within the context of the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen-Bohm (EPR) experiment embodied in Bell's locality inequality which was tested in Aspect's Paris experiment:

"If there is a nonlocal connection between distant particles, what can we say about the possibility of using it to send signals from one of these particles to the other? Within the essentially statistical framework of the current quantum theory, this would require that there be something that we could do, for example to particle A which would change the statistical result of measurements of the spin of particle B in one or more directions. We shall show that this is, in fact, impossible, from which it follows that EPR correlations cannot make possible the transmission of signals of any kind (including, for example, those that are faster than light)." p. 139

Note that the Bohm theory is not epistemological like Bohr's and von Neumann's. Rather, it is ontological which implies that it is fundamentally non-statistical, though it can explain all of the tested quantum statistical results under the right conditions. Conventional quantum mechanics was designed to deal with ensembles of independent simple systems. Stuart Kauffman, on the other hand, is interested in the intrinsic self-organizing ability of individual complex adaptive systems called "IGUS" by Murray Gell-Mann which is an acronym for "Information Gathering Utilization Systems". Bohm's theory, being ontological is ideally suited to describe the individual IGUS. New technology, like the scanning tunneling microscope, laser-cooling and magnetic traps, at the nanometer level and smaller, are making manipulations and observations of single quantum systems almost commonplace. Brian Josephson and co-workers have conjectured that living biological matter can utilize quantum nonlocality to send signals in a fundamentally new non-statistically-based way. This ontological loop hole in quantum mechanics automatically has the spontaneous self-organization sought for by Kauffman. The key assumption required by Eberhard is that the statistical predictions of conventional or orthodox quantum mechanics are not violated. A necessary and sufficient condition for that is the conservation of probability current. This can be traced to the axiom of "unitarity" Bohm and Hiley continue:

"Let us suppose an external system with coordinate y is allowed to interact with the spin or particle A ... The most general possible result of this interaction will be represented by a unitary transformation on the sub-system consisting of y and A, because, by hypothesis, we are assuming that our interaction does not directly distrub B. If it did then this would not constitute sending a signal from A to B, but would just be a direct disturbance of B by its interaction with y ... Let us now consider spin averages for any spin ... for particle B. In the undisturbed state this average ... will be constituted of four terms, of which two may be called 'diagonal' and the other two called 'off diagonal'... A typical off diagonal terms will be ... zero ... It is well known that a unitary transformation will not change the scalar products. It follows then that because this transformation acts only on particle A, the diagonal terms remain the same as before and that the off diagonal terms remain zero. Therefore the average spin of particle B will be the same after transformation as before and we conclude then that noting that we do to particle A will change the average spin properties of particle B." pp. 139-140

Even this is a very formal argument, but Bohm and Hiley, evolving from De Broglie and Einstein's intuitions, have a more intuitively visualizable description of all this which is not at all possible in the Stapp and Penrose "collapse" formulations that spin off from Bohr's and von-Neumann's. Thus:

"Of course, until we are able to carry out experiments on individual processes that are more accurate than the limits set by the uncertainty principle, it will not be possible to use quantum nonlocality for the purpose of sending signals. For as shown in chapter 7, in statistical measurements the EPR correlations between distant particles do not make it possible for signals to be sent from one particle to another." p. 282

Here is the important intuitive notion. The key word is "fragile":

"More generally any attempt to send a signal by influencing one of a pair of particles under EPR correlation will encounter difficulties from the irreducibly participatory nature of all quantum processes. If for example we tried to 'modulate' the overall wave function so that it could carry a signal in a way similar to what is done by a radio wave, we would find that the whole pattern of this wave would be so fragile that its order could change radically in a chaotic anf complex way. As a result no signal could be carried." p. 284

This fragility of the ontological quantum wave attached to a single classical material system or "beable" can be directly traced to the "one-way" nature of orthodox quantum mechanics in which the quantum wave is the "unmoved mover" acting directly on its beable without the latter acting directly on it in a self-organizing way. It is this one-way action of Bohm's quantum force, i.e. the negative gradient of the quantum potential Q, on the particle (beable) that is responsible for conservation of probability current and unitarity which is the basis of Eberhard's theorem. Introduce post-quantum backactivity of direct action of the beable on its guiding quantum wave and we now have "a two-way relationship between wave and particle". This is a feedback-control loop between quantum wave and its attached classical many-particle system point in configuration space (or, alternatively and in addition to, gauge field configuration) which replaces the fragility with a robust self-organization upon which the random variation of Darwinian natural selection can operate. We still have to show why orthodox quantum mechanics works so well for all forms of inanimate matter including inanimate sub-levels of animate matter. For example, PET scans and nuclear magnetic resonance imaging of living matter work wonderfully well and they only require orthodox quantum mechanics. I will return to this all-important issue used by Mulhauser et-al to debunk all theories of quantum mind, but now we should shift our attention back to Stuart Kauffman's brilliant book. Kauffman will be to the 21st Century what Darwin was to the 19th. Kauffman's work provides a data base of, at least indirect, biological evidence for post-quantum physics. If nonlocal post-quantum communication turns out to be a fact of nature, it opens Pandora's box to paranormal phenomena like precognitive remote viewing and other effects now being studied at the PEAR Laboratory at Princeton University. It is the only way to reconcile alleged paranormal phenomena with the laws of physics IMHO. But, more importantly, nonlocal communication may turn out to be essential to understand the workings of ordinary mental processes in the single brain as well as telepathic connections between brains separated in both space and time. Furthermore, nonlocal communication would make ultra-fast quantum computing chips possible. These chips might even be capable of inner felt-experience if the post-quantum field of the microtubule infrastructure is the mindfield in the sense described by David Chalmers in the December 1995 Scientific American.

Kauffman points out that single-celled life evolved soon (about 550 million years) after the planet Earth formed about 4 billion years ago. Yet not much happened for the next 3 billion years until the Cambrian explosion only five hundred million years ago. He compares this explosion in the diversity and complexity of life to a kind of non-equilibrium "avalanche" instability i.e. "a natural phase transition in complex chemical systems" (p.48) not to any panspermia or to any intervention by advanced extra-terrestrial life forms, including time travellers from our relative future. The story of the Garden of Eden as well as other Bible tales obviously suggests such contact of our ancestors with advanced intelligence. The so-called "Bible Code" of equidistant letter sequences (ELS) also suggests this sci-fi scenario, though Michael Drosnin's popular book on it has been rebuked by the scientists he cites as being too sensational. Therefore, we cannot accept Drosnin's account uncritically at face value, yet we cannot reject the original data from the Torah entirely, but must keep an open mind awaiting news from serious scholars on what may prove to be evidence for contact with an advanced intelligence that has intervened in our historical evolution in strong violation of Star Fleet's "Prime Directive". :-)

"The existence of spontaneous order is a stunning challenge to our settled ideas in biology since Darwin. Most biologists have believed for over a century that selection is the sole source of order in biology, that selection alone is the 'tinkerer' that crafts the forms. But if the forms selection chooses among were generated by laws of complexity, then selection has always had a handmaiden. It is not, after all, the sole source of order, and organisms are not just tinkered-together contraptions, but expressions of deeper natural laws. If all this is true, what a revision of the Darwinian worldview will lie before us! Not we the accidental, but we the expected." p. 8

I claim that the fundamental law of self-organizing complexity is to be found in the extension of quantum mechanics to post-quantum mechanics in which there is "a two-way relationship between wave and particle". Darwinian accidents correspond to the boundary conditions on the wave and the interaction Hamiltonian coupling the particle to its external, generally noisy, environment. Self-organization emerges when the one-way relation of wave on particle is supplemented by the direct backactivity of the particle (or system of charges and electroweak fields) on its guiding quantum pilot wave. The influence of this quantum wave is negligible in the classical limit. It is important to realize that the quantum pilot wave is qualitatively different from a classical sound wave in matter or a classical electromagnetic wave either in matter or in empty space. All classical waves propagate in familiar three-dimensional space, on the contrary, the quantum waves attached to these classical waves or to systems of several interacting elementary particles propagate in a higher dimensional configuration space of these classical material "beables". Take a system of interacting particles separated from each other in ordinary space. The configuration of these particles is represented as a single "system point" in a higher dimensional space. The quantum potential acts directly on the system point in this higher dimensional configuration space. The level surfaces of constant quantum potential in configuration space form the kind of "fitness landscape" that is basic to Stuart Kauffman's paradigm. It is this action in higher dimensional configuration space that is responsible for the quantum weirdness of matter in ordinary three-dimensional space. Therefore, configuration space is not simply a mental construct, but has an ontological basis as objective nonlocal quantum connections between localized classical beables separated in space and, as we shall see, even in time. Ordinary quantum mechanics corresponds to a quantum fitness landscape whose form does not depend upon the motion of the beable system point through it. Post-quantum mechanics, defined as the addition of backactivity, means that the fitness landscape depends directly upon the actual path of the beable system point. However, this motion also depends upon the slope or gradient of the quantum potential at the location of the system point. Therefore, we have a self-referential feedback control loop between quantum wave and classical beable which is the fundamental physical mechanism for Kauffman's "spontaneous self-organization".

"Now that my symbols have outelbowed space."

Dylan Thomas, "To-day, This Insect"

Kauffman gives a good popular explanation of the classical limit of the second law of thermodynamics which is worth citing because then we can compare it with the qualitatively different situation of system of particles with an entangled quantum wave function so that they all share a common quantum potential..

"In equilibrium systems -- those closed to the exchange of matter and energy with their environment -- a measure of disorder called entropy inevitably increases ... Consider a box filled with gas molecules, modeled as hard elastic spheres. All the molecules could be in a small corner of the box, or they could be spread out more or less uniformly. One arrangement is just as unlikely as any other. But a vastly larger number of the possible configurations correspond to situations in which the molecules are more or less uniformly distributed than to situations with all the molecules confined, say, to a single corner. Boltzmann argued that the increase in entropy in equilibrium systems arises from nothing more than the statistical tendency of the system to pass randomly through all possible arrangements (the so called ergodic hypothesis). ... Left to itself, a system will visit all possible microscopic, fine-grained configurations equally often. But the system will spend most of its time in those coarse-grained patterns satisfied by very large numbers of fine-grained patterns -- molecules uniformly distributed throughout the box. So the second law is not so mysterious after all.

The consequence of the second law is that in equilibrium systems, order -- the most unlikely of the arrangements -- tends to disappear. If order is defined as those coarse-grained states that correspond to only a few fine-grained states ... then at thermodynamic equilibrium, those delicate arrangements disappear because of the ergodic wandering of the system through all its microstates. It follows that the maintenance of order requires that some form of work be done on the system. In the absence of work, order disappears. Hence we come to our current sense that an incoherent collapse of order is the natural state of things. Again, we the accidental, we the unexpected." pp. 9-10

Kauffman's book explains what is wrong with the above picture. The equilibrium statistical mechanics, whether classical or quantum, and kinetic theory of closed thermodynamics is not the right tool:

"All living systems 'eat': they take in matter and energy in order to reproduce themselves. This means that they are ... open thermodynamic systems.

In contrast, closed thermodynamic systems take in no matter or energy from their environments. A great deal is understood about the behavior of closed thermodynamic systems. The theorists of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics have studied such systems for over 100 years. In contrast, remarkably little is understood about the possible behaviors of open thermodynamic systems. Not so surprising this ignorance. The vast flowering of all life-forms over the past 3.45 billion years is merely a hint of the possible behaviors of open thermodynamic systems." p. 50

Note that Kauffman only includes "matter and energy" as "food". He leaves out "information". This is because he is really thinking classically and not quantum mechanically. In Bohm's version of quantum mechanics there is an actual disembodied field of "active information" for a single "pure" quantum state that is qualitatively different from the classical "passive" Shannon information of "impure" mixtures of quantum states. It is the passive Shannon information which is tied to matter and energy in Kauffman's sense. Bohm's "active information" is essentially the information field called for by David Chalmers in his December, 1995 Scientific American article on consciousness as a physical phenomenon. How active quantum information transforms to classical Shannon information and vice versa is an important topic on which research is only now beginning.

Nonlocality is not the only profoundly new idea that Bohm introduces into quantum mechanics. "Form-dependence" is another new related idea. Bohm and Hiley wrote:

"... the quantum potential Q is not changed when we multiply the field psi by an arbitrary constant. (This is because psi appears in both the numerator and the denominator of Q.) This means that the effect of the quantum potential is independent of the strength (i.e. the intensity) of the quantum field but depends only on its form. By contrast, classical waves, which act mechanically (i.e. to transfer energy and momentum, for example, to push a floating object), always produce effects which are more or less proportional to the strength of the wave. For example one may consider a water wave which causes a cork to bob. The further the cork is from the center of the wave the less it will move. But with the quantum field, it is as if the cork could bob with full strength even far from the source of the wave." p. 31

The quantum field of active information may be compared to "a ship on automatic pilot being guided by radio waves. Here, too, the effect of the radio waves is independent of their intensity and depends only on their form. The essential point is that the ship is moving with its own energy, and that the form of the radio waves is taken up to direct the much greater energy of the ship. We may therefore propose that an electron too moves under its own energy, and that the form of the quantum wave directs the energy of the electron." pp 31-32

"In this explanation of the quantum properties of the electron, the fact that the quantum potential depends only on the form and not on the amplitude of the quantum field is evidently of crucial significance. ... Effects of this kind are indeed frequently encountered in ordinary experience wherever we are dealing with information. ... we have in this way introduced a concept that is new in the context of physics -- a concept that we shall call active information. The basic idea of active information is that a form having very little energy enters into and directs a much greater energy. The activity of the latter is in this way given a form similar to that of the smaller energy.

It is important to distinguish our concept of active information from the more technical definition of information commonly adopted in physics in terms of, for example, Shannon's ideas implying that there is a quantitative measure of information that represents the way in which the state of a system is uncertain to us (e.g. that we can only specify probabilities of various states). ... we wish to propose here a quite different notion of information that is not essentially related to our own knowledge or lack of it. Rather in the case that we are discussing, for example, it will be information that is relevant to determining the movement of the electron itself. ... the information held by human beings is, in general, active rather than passive, not merely reflecting something outside itself but actually, or at least potentially, capable of participating in the thing to which it refers. Passive information may in fact be regarded as a limiting case in which we abstract from the activity of information. This is essentially the kind of information that is currently used in information theory, e.g. as used by Shannon. The puzzle in this approach is that of how information that is merely passive within us is able to determine actual objective processes outside of us." p. 37

Seen this way, it is natural to suppose that the mind is a nonlocal quantum field of Bohm's active information of relatively tiny energy which directs and coordinates the much larger metabolic energies of an autocatalytic network of organic molecules. We now have a clear physical picture of how thought, as Chalmers's physical information field, acts on matter. It only requires the additional post-quantum backactivity of matter back on thought to close the feedback-control circuit required for Kauffman's "spontaneous self-organization" that is the constant "handmaiden" imposing a robust order on the random variations of Darwinian natural selection. Professor Bader has a very useful new way of doing practical calculations of molecular structures, stability and reactivity in quantum chemistry which is formally quite close to using Bohm's quantum potential.

Bohm and Hiley continue: "This introduces several new features into the movement. First of all, it means that particles moving in empty space under the action of no classical forces need not travel uniformly in straight lines. This is a radical departure from classical Newtonian theory. Moreover, since the effect of the wave does not necessarily fall off with the distance, even remote features of the environment can profoundly affect the environment." p. 32

You will note that Kauffman's above intuitive discussion of the second law of thermodynamics assumes Newtonian mechanics. What happens if all the particles in the box share a common giant quantum potential? The ergodic theorem can be expected to fail. This means that if work is done to prepare the set of particles in a highly improbable state, the time it takes to approach thermal equilibrium may be very different from what one would get classically. The subject of equilibrium quantum statistical mechanics for the final most probable states of identical particles with no classical forces between them is simple. For example, if the identical particles have quantum spin ½ like electrons, protons and neutrons do, then their common giant quantum wavefunction is totally antisymmetric under exchange of any two particles. "Antisymmetric" here means that the wave function gets multiplied by the factor -1 when the two identical particles change places with each other. The math shows that the resulting many-particle quantum potential has infinitely large repulsive quantum forces between any two particles that try to occupy the same place at the same time, even if there are no classical forces. This is the Pauli exclusion principle which is responsible for all sub-nuclear, nuclear, atomic and solid-state structure. It also plays a vital role in the formation of the chemical bonds that glue atoms into molecules. Furthermore, as the temperature of the electrons is lowered in thermal equilibrium to the solid state, a "Fermi surface" forms in momentum space. The shape of the Fermi surface of electrons in solids has profound affects on the properties of those solids. In contrast, if we have many particles of quantum spin 1 like massless photons (quanta of light) and massive Helium 4 atoms with two protons and two neutrons in the tiny nucleus and two electrons, for example, the wave function is symmetric. That is, the wave function does not change under exchange of a pair of identical particles. The result is that the giant quantum potential exerts attractive forces on the identical particles as they get closer together. This attraction was first noticed by Einstein and is seen as "photon bunching" in quantum optics effects like Hanbury-Brown-Twiss intensity interferometry which is a good way to measure the angular size of stars through the turbulent atmosphere. A new effect happens for massive particles like Helium 4 atoms. Since they are conserved in number at low temperature, one gets a "Bose-Einstein condensation" of the identical Helium atoms into the same state of motion. When one puts in the classical forces between the atoms, we get a quantum liquid or superfluid which is able to flow without friction through narrow tubes below a critical speed. Another Bose-Einstein condensate of atoms using laser cooling has recently been demonstrated experimentally. This opens the door to "matter wave lasers" that will have practical application in the manufacture of computer chips. Therefore, the effects of giant quantum potentials are profound. The well known examples I gave above, so far, use only quantum mechanics with no post-quantum backactivity. It is backactivity that I suspect is relevant to the problem of making a practical warp drive for star travel, and I have no doubt that it is essential to Kauffman's "spontaneous self-organization" in autocatalytic molecular networks held far from thermal equilibrium. Kauffman's picture is still too classical. For one thing it leaves out the fact that living matter has an "inner feel". This problem of "inner feel", or "qualia", is discussed in detail in Henry Stapp's book, Matter, Mind and Quantum Mechanics. Stapp does not use Bohm's picture, but he comes up with a coarser-grained approximation to it based on extending Heisenberg's epistemological picture of "potentia" collapsing to "actua" to an ontology of what is really "out there" independent of our knowledge. I should say more about my off-hand remark about "warp drive" above. In their discussion of how a tiny active information organizes a much larger energy, Bohm and Hiley remark "the vacuum is generally regarded as full with an immense energy of fluctuation, revealed for example in the Casimir effect, it may be further suggested that ultimately the energy of this particle comes from this source." p. 38

"Igor, it's alive!"

Mel Brooks, Frankenstein

Kauffman writes on the origin of life:

"Most of my colleagues believe that life emerged simple and became complex. They picture nude RNA molecules replicating and replicating and eventually stumbling on and assembling all the complicated chemical machinery we find in a living cell. Most of my colleagues also believe that life is uterly dependent on the molecular logic of template replication, the A-T, G-C Watson-Crick pairing ... I hold a renegade view: life is not shackled to the magic of template replication, but based on a deeper logic." p. 47

Yes, the deeper self-organizing logic of post-quantum backactivity making "a two-way relationship between wave and particle".

"I hope to persuade you that life is a natural property of complex chemical systems, that when the number of different kinds of molecules in a chemical soup passes a certain threshold, a self-sustaining network of reactions -- an autocatalytic metabolism will suddenly appear. Life emerge, I suggest, no simple, but complex and whole, and has remained complex and whole ever since -- not because of a mysterious elan vital, but thanks to the simple, profound transformation of dead molecules into an organization by which each molecule's formation is catalyzed by some other molecule in the organization. The secret of life, the wellspring of reproduction, is not to be found in the beauty of Watson-Crick pairing, but in the achievement of collective catalytic closure." p. 48

I would not be so quick to reject Henri Bergson's "elan vital" since it is not at all "mysterious" but corresponds to the Bohm quantum potential Q. Let us see what Bohm means by "whole" which is crucial to implementing Kauffman's visionary idea in terms of an objective, though non-classical mechanical, but still physical, natural "post-quantum" robust self-organizing process. Bohm and Hiley wrote:

"The relationship between parts of a system described above implies a new quality of wholeness of the entire system going beyond anything that can be specified solely in terms of the actual spatial relationships of all the particles. This is indeed the feature which makes the quantum theory go beyond mechanism of any kind. For it is the essence of mechanism to say that basic reality consists of the parts of a system which are in a preassigned interaction. The concept of the whole, then, has only a secondary significance, in the sense that it is only a way of looking at certain overall aspects of what is in reality the behavior of the parts. In our interpretation of the quantum theory, we see that the interaction of parts is determined by something that cannot be described solely in terms of these parts and their preassigned interrelationships. Rather it depends on the many-body wave function (which, in the usual interpretation, is said to determine the quantum state of the system ... Something with this kind of dynamical significance that refers directly to the whole system is thus playing a key role in the theory. We emphasize that this is the most fundamentally new aspect of the quantum theory." pp 58-59

Kauffman points out that all the major mass-energy systems in the universe are open and in essentially permanent non-equilibrium because of the cosmological expansion of the universe which provides the work required to prevent the universal heat death which was mistakenly thought to be our final fate in the old physics. Lee Smolin's The Life of the Cosmos is a good reference for the latest information on this subject.

"... the evolving universe since the Big Bang has yielded the formation of galactic and supragalactic structures on enormous scales. These stellar structures and the nuclear processes within stars, which have generated the atoms and molecules from which life itself arose, are open systems, driven by nonequilibrium processes in the unfolding universe. We are all -- complex atoms, Jupiter, spiral galaxies, warthog, and frog -- the logical progeny of that creative power."

That "creative power" is at least partly in Einstein's classical field equations of the mutable spacetime geometry which both guides the motion of mass-energy densities and flows, while also being warped by them. This is a classical feedback-control loop analogous to, but with essential differences from, the new post-quantum feedback-control loop. Both the classical and post-quantum loops give rise to spontaneous self-organization in Kauffman's sense, but only the post-quantum loops are "alive" with inner felt experiences. This is the essential difference between inanimate and animate matter. The experimental test for the post-quantum hypothesis will be a quantum computing chip emulating the human microtubule infrastructure which, when activated with suitable I/O devices and sensors will claim that it is conscious after it is taught language.

Kauffman wrote: "I hold that life, at its root, does not depend on the magic of Watson-Crick base pairing or any other specific template-replicating machinery. Life at its root, lies in the property of catalytic closure among a collection of molecular species. Alone each molecular species is dead. Jointly, once catalytic closure among them is achieved, the collective system of molecules is alive." p.50

"Catalytic closure ensures that the whole exists by means of the parts ... Autocatalytic sets exhibit the emergent power of holism." p.69

Kauffman is not aware of Bohm's implicate objective wholeness. The incompleteness in in Kauffman's theory is that he is restricted to the explicate emergence of classical mechanism where all influences are by signals propagating in space. This will become clearer below when we discuss Kauffman's computer simulations of Boolean networks near phase transitions "on the edge of chaos."

While this is necessary it is not sufficient. To the extent that the catalytic closure can be completely described by classical rate equations, or by coupled density matrix rate equations in the random phase approximation with no off-diagonal-long-range-order (ODLRO), the system will not be fully "alive" in the sense of having the potential for inner felt experience. This potential is actualized by post-quantum backactivity when thermal noise is sufficiently screened out of the specific subsystem that forms the "Eccles gates" connecting the mental quantum potential to its material system point. The coherent quantum potential forms a fitness landscape for the motion of the system point. The self-organizing fitness landscape changes, i.e. adapts, with the motion of the system point that it is partly determining. This is the feedback-control loop. In addition, the external environment, i.e. Darwinian natural selection, is simultaneously providing input pumping to the mind-matter system. The mind and the immune system both require a kind of non-equilibrium biological superconductivity whose macroscopic quantum coherence is more like that of a laser than that of superfluid helium at thermal equilibrium. Frohlich came up with this sort of mechanism. It is the macroscopic quantum coherence which provides the "common pool of information" for global coordination of all living matter. This global coordination via the giant quantum potential has inner felt experience of qualia as an intrinsic property in the theory I am proposing. To see this more intuitively, let us see how Bohm and Hiley describe active information in complex systems in general and in superconductors in particular.

"The wave function is defined in the configuration space of all the particles." p.60

The "fitness landcape", a primary concept in Kauffman's theory of spontaneous self-organization (that will be discussed in detail below), is determined by the giant coherent quantum potential of the complex adaptive system in this configuration space. Note that the term "particles" can be extended to include electromagnetic field distributions over the entire space of the living organism at a fixed moment of time. The configuration space is then infinite dimensional and the quantum potential becomes a "super quantum potential". Do not confound the configuration space with the Hilbert space. The latter is the range of the wave function, the former is its domain in the sense the theory of functions used in elementary calculus, for example. Relativistic considerations play a negligible role in this aspect of biophysics.

"Its effect on the particles is determined by the phase S and the quantum potential Q, both of which depend only on the form of the wave function and not on its amplitude ... we may therefore regard the wavefunction as containing active information. But this information is ordered in configuration space rather than in the ordinary space of three dimensions. ... consider its implications for the motions of the particles. These now respond in a correlated way to what is, in effect, a common pool of information. This information guides the particles ... Different linear combinations of the wave functions will give rise to different pools of information, which in turn will give rise to corresponding differences in the behavior of the system." p. 60

Bohm's notion of the "common pool of information" is obviously how all living matter is so wonderfully globally coordinated with inner felt experience. The simple "explicate" transmission of nerve signals, and the transport of chemical messengers, both classical processes in the ordinary space of three dimensions, while necessary, but not sufficient to explain life. Therefore, even Kauffman's instant phase transition leading to "catalytic closure", while crucial to the story of life, is not the end of the story. The end of the story is Bohm's "implicate" common pool of quantum information supplemented by post-quantum backactivity from the position of the actual system point of the individual complex adaptive system to its fitness landscape set up by the quantum potential.

"When the wave function is factorized into independent products, this will correspond to having independent pools of information. There is therefore an objective difference between systems which are wholes guided by a pool of common information and systems constituted of independent parts guided by separate pools of information. We may contrast this possibility of objective wholeness with what happens in classical mechanics, in which the notion of a whole is a subjective convenience for describing the behavior of what are in reality a set of independently existing parts in interaction."

A world of caution about the popular term "emergent properties" that Kauffman and others use. What they have in mind is really what Bohm and Hiley call the explicate "subjective wholeness" of classical mechanistic reductionism which really throws the baby out with the bathwater when it comes to understanding the physics of living matter. Catalytic closure will lead to emergent properties in this subjective mechanistic way, but unless it is accompanied by implicate objective wholeness, the system will not be "alive" in the fullest sense. There is a big difference, in Bohm's theory, between the emergence of a vortex in water, or a tornado in the atmosphere, and the objective wholeness of a living organism. Henry Stapp has also made this crucial distinction using his ontological Heisenberg-James model rather than Bohm's.

"The fact that the wave function is in configuration space clearly prevents us from regarding the quantum field as one that carries energy and momentum that was simply transferred to the particles with which it interacted (thus effectively pushing or pulling mechanically on the latter). This is a further factor in addition to the form dependence if the activity if the field which leads us to consider the interpretation of this field as active information. The multidimensional nature of this field need not then be so mysterious, since information can be organized into as many sets of dimension as needed. ... the energy and momentum are not coming from the quantum field. Rather [separated parts of the system are] informed to respond in a correlated way by the pool of information common [to them]." p.61

Here for the first time in the history of the mind-matter problem (see Stapp's Mind, Matter and Quantum Mechanics for historical background) do we see clearly the physics of how the mind ("ghost" or "elan vital") influences its attached matter ("flesh). Be clear that what we now mean by "ghost", "elan vital", "mind" is not some supernatural or mystical entity beyond rational science, but is, rather, an objective physical field that is beyond space and time but which globally coordinates the correlated motion of extended complex adaptive living systems. Bohm and Hiley, in 4.3 show how the objective wholeness of common pools of quantum information explains the chemical bond in a much clearer intuitively visualizable manner than the conventional formal approach based on Bohr's Copenhagen interpretation.

"In terms of the usual interpretation of quantum theory, we have no intuitive notion of the difference between the ... [bonding and anti-bonding] states, nor indeed ehat it means to form a linear combination of states. Yet it is just this which is responsible for a vast range of chemical properties. In our interpretation these properties are understood through the notion that the wavefunction of a molecule constitutes a common pool of information that guides the activity of all its particles in related ways... Different wave functions, constituting different pools of information, will then give rise to well-defined differences in the behavior of the system." p. 65

This notion of objective quantum wholeness is, to a certain degree, scale invariant. It will also apply to Kauffman's autocatalytic networks of molecules. The different separated molecules in the autocatalytic network above the critical complexity threshold, described by Kauffman, will have control-electron subsystems which, under suitable conditions of protection against thermal noise, share a common pool of information. A good example of this is our immune system.

"Physics has already developed in such a way that the classical potential V, can be regarded as an actual existent field distributed throughout three dimensional space. This field can be regarded as the source of the change of information with time brought about by V in the Hamilton-Jacobi equation. It obeys a wave equation implying the detailed conservation of energy and momentum. Therefore, we can, if we wish, attribute the energy and momentum to the field and thus imagine it is flowing throughout space and into and out of the particle. But as we have seen, this picture could not be coherently applied to the quantum potential. ... the picture of a continuously conserved flow of energy and momentum will not also apply except as a limiting case holding only in the classical approximation." p.62

The above distinction is crucial to the quest of the NASA "Breakthrough Propulsion Group" to develop a propellent free-drive for space flight. Any practical successful warp drive will have find a way to make a giant, but controllable, super-post-quantum potential attached to small regions (nanometer or smaller) of the classical spacetime metric. Post-quantum backactivity is essential for the control of this drive with the feeble classical electromagnetic fields and their super-quantum potentials that are available to us. These feeble fields must trigger inflationary phase-transitions in the metric that quickly saturate. The problem is analogous to putting control rods in a nuclear fission reactor.

"Superfluidity and superconductivity provide a very good illustration of how a common pool of information can give rise to strikingly new properties of a many-body system. ... at low temperature many substances can go into a new state in which currents (either of atoms or electrons) can flow indefinitely without viscosity or resistance. This state is stable only up to a certain temperature at which the property disappears. ... What is essential here is that the helium nuclei are bosons and that the electron pairs that are responsible for superconductivity are also effectively bosons." pp65-66

Note that this is a thermal equilibrium system, but Frohlich has shown how an analogous effect of Bose-Einstein condensation of electric dipole vibrations can occur in a thermodynamically open biological membrane that is pumped far from equilibrium. The metabolic pumping rate plays the role of an inverse absolute temperature, so that a high pump rate corresponds to a low effective temperature for the open dissipative structure.

"Clearly no matter what the detailed structure ... the understanding of superflow depends basically on ... why the particles move stably together with a common velocity ... we shall have to show how the quantum potential ... actually constitutes active information that keeps all the particles moving together in spite of perturbations that would otherwise scatter them." p. 68

Now we see the awesome power of Bohm's intuitive genius, which in this case even surpasses the great Feynman who never said it so clearly in his papers on the subject. It is interesting that Feynman was a great friend to Bohm and vehemently defended him to his establishment detractors as described in David Peat's biography of Bohm, Infinite Potential.

" In ordinary scattering processes, the energy conservation condition between initial and final states can be satisfied and we get a real transition into a scattered wave. In the case of a superfluid however energy conservation cannot be satisfied so we get only virtual contributions to the wave function. If we evaluated the quantum potential, it would be seen that these latter contributions imply an additional force on the particle which accounts for why it is first accelerated away from the obstacle and then brought back to its original velocity. Since every particle will behave in essentially the same way [due to the total permutation symmetry of the many-boson wave function] it follows that the liquid as a whole will flow around the obstacle and then reconstitute its flow in its original direction.

This is basically our intuitive explanation of why the state of superflow is stable. This is evidently a purely quantum mechanical response of the whole system. It involves not only nonlocal interactions due to the quantum potential, but also the irreducible quantum wholeness implied by the fact that this interaction cannot be expressed in terms of a pre-assigned function of the particle coordinates." p. 70

"One can say that in the state of superflow, this [common pool of] information brings about a coordinated movement of all the particles that can be thought of as resembling a 'ballet dance' (in which all the dancers separate in a systematic way to go round an obstacle and then reform their original pattern." p. 71

We now come to a quote that is crucial to the completing of Kauffman's program to supplement Darwinian natural selection with an even more fundamental spontaneous self-organizational physical process.

"This means that the guidance condition and the quantum potential implied by it can, under certain conditions, have the novel quality of being able to organize the activity of an entire set of particles, in a way that depends on a pool of information common to the whole set. This behavior is reminiscent of what is found in living beings which are similarly organized by a common pool of information ..." p. 71

This illustrates the essential physical difference between explicate "emergent properties" and implicate objective wholeness. So far, there is no role for post-quantum backactivity in the above beautiful explanation of superfluid flow. What would a post-quantum superfluid with backactivity be like? It is not enough in the new biophysics to rely only on the classically-mechanistic notion of "emergence" of a collective mode out of only pre-assigned interactions. We also see how the breakdown in local conservation of energy and momentum flows in ordinary three-dimensional space implied by the action of the quantum potential results in new quantum forces from virtual processes. This is a clue for how to make a practical propellent-free drive for spacecraft.