Beyond the Quantum
Essays in the New Physics Unifying Mind and Matter
by
Jack Sarfatti
This research has been funded by the Internet Science Education Project, a 501©(3) California Educational Corporation. Individuals and schools may use this information freely for non-commercial educational purposes. The corporation reserves all commercial rights.
Version 0.2
Certain new and original ideas are repeated many times like the leitmotifs in Richard Wagner's Operas. They are the deep attractors in the post-quantum mindscape which guides, and is guided by, the author's changing material brain configuration.
Making Star Trek Real
The considerations to be presented below naturally lead to the conjecture that any actual spacecraft capable of propellant-free flight using a practical post-quantum warp drive will itself have to be "alive", "sentient" and even "conscious". That is, any star ship capable of warp drive will have to be itself an artificially conscious entity. No purely classical or even purely quantum warp drive is possible. It needs post-quantum sentience. This is a strong prediction of post-quantum mechanics.
MARC G. MILLIS, Chair
NASA Lewis Research Center
FRANK MEAD, JR., Co-Chair
USAF Phillips Laboratory
In 1996, NASA established a small research program on "Breakthrough Propulsion Physics." This program looks beyond textbook science to seek the breakthroughs that could make deep space travel practical and affordable and ultimately enable interstellar voyages. Specifically, this means discovering breakthroughs to
(1) propel a vehicle without rockets or beamed power,
(2) attain the maximum transit speeds physically achievable, and
(3) create energy production methods to power such propulsion devices. Since this program looks beyond today's established science, a special emphasis is on ensuring that work is simultaneously credible and visionary -- credible progress toward incredible possibilities. Papers are invited that present theories, proposed experiments, or empirical evidence that are aimed at addressing any of the three breakthrough goals specified above. This includes:
(1) fundamental physics of forces and acceleration including the coupling between inertia, gravity, electromagnetism, inertial frames, and spacetime,
(2) fundamental physics of motion through spacetime or the motion of perturbations of spacetime, and
(3) fundamental physics of energy exchange mechanisms. Papers are also invited which
(4) describe and compare competing theories or empirical evidence with special emphasis to their potential for achieving any of the breakthrough goals. Papers are also invited which present lessons learned or suggestions for how to conduct such research that is simultaneously visionary and rigorously credible.
My response to this is:
The basic conclusion is that no practical classical or even orthodox quantum propellant-less warp drive is possible in principle. This is a consequence of Eberhard's theorem in the quantum case. Note the emphasis on the words "practical" and "propellant-less" in the above remark.
What is required is a post-quantum extension beyond orthodox quantum physics. Using the Bohm version of quantum mechanics, one can see that what is required for a practical propellant-less warp drive is a robust super-quantum potential attached to the Arnowitt-Deser-Misner (ADM) canonical variables i.e. essentially the three-geometry, lapse and shift functions which are the quantum gravity "beables" in Bohm's theory.
One also needs a coupling to electromagnetic fields poised on the edge of chaos in which a weak electromagnetic field can trigger a self-organized critical avalanche in the super-quantum potential-metric beable system. This would allow the controlled manufacture of exotic matter from ordinary matter in a thin nanometer scale boundary layer around the ship. The Alcubierre and similar solutions can then be implemented.
The point is that robust quantum potentials are not allowed in orthodox quantum physics. Furthermore, the classical fields needed in the absence of a giant quantum potential are too strong for a practical device. As in quantum tunneling, the quantum potential reduces the required classical field intensities to trigger the avalanche phase transition from ordinary to exotic matter.
The key in all this is post-quantum backactivity which stabilizes the fragile quantum potentials into robust forms. More details are given below.
Einstein's Relativity in Bohm's Quantum Reality
Breaking Classical Codes with Quantum Computers, Info-War, Warp Drives, and all that.
It should never be forgotten that Einsteins special and general theories of relativity are strictly classical theories. There is no rational reason to suppose that they should not be modified at the quantum level where objective nonlocality and objective context-dependence are important as in David Bohms version of quantum reality. The late great Richard Feynman told me he was loathe to give up special relativitys Lorentz invariance even in the quantum regime. Unless we do, there is no chance of developing a practical "propellant-less" interstellar warp drive the way Marc Milliss NASA group at Lewis Space Center in Cleveland would like to do.
Nevertheless, Bohm and Hiley in The Undivided Universe (Chapter 12) write:
"... it is indeed possible to provide a Lorentz invariant [ontological] interpretation of the one-body Dirac equation. For the many-body system ... it is still possible to obtain a Lorentz invariant description of the manifest world of ordinary large scale experience ... In addition ... all statistical predictions of the quantum theory are Lorentz invariant in our interpretation. This means that our approach is consistent with Lorentz invariance in all experiments which are thus far possible." p.271
We must be ready for an observable objective breakdown of Einsteins relativity in post-quantum mechanics because of spontaneous self-organizing backactivity enabling "nonlocal communication". The term "nonlocal communication" means the use of Bohm's "objective wholeness" and "nonlocality" to make a new kind of "spooky telepathic" practical communication channel. It would be possible to locally decode messages at a "receiver" without having to wait for correlated data from the "sender" to arrive by luminal or subluminal means. The famous Aspect experiment in Paris did not show nonlocal communication. Indeed, there is a correct general proof that nonlocal communication is not possible in orthodox quantum mechanics. This no-go theorem can be directly traced to the fact that spontaneous self-organizing "backactivity" is negligible in the orthodox quantum limit where quantum sequences are irreducibly random. A good popular discussion of this is found in the late Heinz Pagelss The Cosmic Code. Self-organizing post-quantum backactivity introduces controllable non-randomness into quantum sequences. This has important consequences for recent research in "quantum cryptography", "quantum teleportation" and "quantum computation". Quantum computers, in principle, can rapidly break any classical code, though it cannot do so perfectly every time it tries. What can post-quantum computers do?
Bohm and Hiley continue:
"When this question is pursued further however, it is found that we cannot maintain a Lorentz invariant interpretation of the quantum nonlocal connection of distant systems. This is, of course, not surprising. Indeed we show that there has to be a unique frame in which these nonlocal connections are instantaneous. A similar result is also shown to hold for field theories. These likewise give Lorentz invariant results in the manifest world of ordinary experience..." p.271
What about the manifest world of alleged extraordinary "paranormal" experiences of modern-day Quasi-Scientific Shamans like Timothy Leary, John Lilly and Terrence McKenna, or CIA-certified remote viewers like Ingo Swann, for example? The theory of decoherent classical histories of Murray Gell-Mann and James Hartle opens Pandoras Box to the paranormal "universe next door" although they would not agree. I will return to this below, but, briefly, Bohm and Hiley remark:
"If there are many significantly different quasi-classical worlds ( as seems to be suggested in the many-universes point of view) one should better say that the IGUS (Information Gathering Utilization System) evolves to exploit a particular quasi-classical world or a set of such worlds." p. 340
Gell-Mann and Hartle are working within the late Everetts "many-minds" model rather that De Witts "splitting universes" model which is really quite different. Therefore, an alteration of the memories of the observers, as may happen under the influence of a psychedelic drug like ketamine or LSD, for example, would be tantamount to a shift of "preferred basis" in quantum Hilbert space into a different classical history than the one experienced by the majority of us IGUSs in "straight" modes of perception.
"... and for the statistical predictions of the quantum theory." p.271
Remember that Bohms ontological quantum mechanics applies to individual complex adaptive systems like ourselves in which statistical ensembles are physically inappropriate. Bohrs pragmatic "Copenhagen interpretation" is trapped in the rut of statistics. A good example of being caught in that conceptual straight jacket is Victor Stengers book, The Unconscious Quantum.
"But where individual quantum processes are concerned, our ontological interpretation requires a unique frame of the kind we have described both for field theories and particle theories." p. 271
Our streams of inner-felt consciousness are individual non-random animate post-quantum processes and the role of Bohms "unique frame" is amplified from what it is for individual inanimate random quantum processes. Why does a rock not have a conscious mind in the same way we have one? The essential objective difference between an animate post-quantum process and an inanimate quantum process, is that the former has, and the latter does not have, spontaneous self-organization in a "two-way" relationship between the "common pool", or quantum mind-field of "active information" with its attached "beable", which is the relevant part of the classical material brain configuration. The quantum mind-field of active information is beyond space and time in configuration space and Hilbert space. The complex adaptive animate beable is located as space and time separated parts of a post-quantum computing machine coherently organized by the common pool of macroscopically-coherent active quantum information. The post-quantum conscious computer is beyond any classical machine determined by pre-assigned interactions between its separated parts. Unlike an orthodox quantum computer of the kind described by David Deutsch, for example, the post-quantum computer is able to exploit nonlocal communication. Direct evidence for this in our own brains is given in a paper by Fred Alan Wolf on Libets experiments to be presented at the Vigier Conference at York University in Toronto in August 1997. Inner-felt experiences are simply the back-active imprints of the beable configuration on its guiding common pool of active quantum information. This is a more general objective physical definition of conscious life that is not restricted to self-organizing non-equilibrium carbon-based autocatalytic molecular networks "poised on the edge between order and chaos", though it certainly applies to them. See Stuart Kauffmans At Home In The Universe for background information on autocatalytic molecular networks and their associated classical "self-organized criticality" phase transitions. Post-quantum mechanics supplements and, thereby completes Kauffmans classical picture of how spontaneous self-organization is prior to Darwinian natural selection in the evolution of life. To see how this same idea applies to the evolution of the whole physical universe see Lee Smolins, The Life of the Cosmos.
Bohm and Hiley continue:
"We discuss the meaning of this preferred frame and show that the idea is not only perfectly consistent, but also fits in with an important tradition regarding the way in which new levels of reality (e.g. atoms) are introduced in physics to explain older levels (e.g. continuous matter) on a qualitatively new basis." p. 271
In the case of the one-body Dirac equation, one can imagine, in Bohms ontology, a non-equilibrium dissipative structure of the hidden variables that violates the Born probability rule that the density in configuration space is |psi|2. That this is sufficient for nonlocal communication, if the non-equilibrium can be maintained, was demonstrated in Valentinis Cambridge University doctoral dissertation under Dennis Sciama. I thank Brian Josephson for communicating that fact to me. The modified relativistic continuity equation for probability current has a sub-quantal "osmotic" contribution (p. 273), as in Vigiers models, which provides
"a non-covariant process of approach to (thermal) equilibrium" (p. 274). The thermal equilibrium distribution is Lorentz invariant. Note that our universe is not in global thermal equilibrium because of the cosmological expansion of three-dimensional space out of the big bang. Note also "The osmotic velocity ... may be infinite where rho approaches zero and would imply speeds greater than that of light.. it leads to no inconsistencies." (p.274).
The next case is the formal Dirac equation for a many-body system (12.4) even in the standard non-ontological Copenhagen interpretation
"...at least as far as probabilities are concerned, the many-body Dirac equation is Lorentz invariant both in form and content .. what about Lorentz invariance in the ontological interpretation of the many-body Dirac equation? (12.6) ... a nonlocal connection in the velocities of the particles implies a nonlocal quantum potential that accounts for the mutually related accelerations that are entailed by the guidance conditions." p. 281... the ontological interpretation gives the same statistical results for all measurement-manifestation processes as does the usual interpretation. ... However, ... it does not follow that the ontological interpretation for an individual system in terms of a [beable] particle with a well-defined trajectory is a Lorentz invariant concept. ... If there is a nonlocal connection of the kind implied by our guidance conditions, then it follows that, for example, point a and point b instantaneously affect each other. But if the theory is covariant, there should be similar instantaneous connections in every Lorentz frame. ... It would then be possible for A acting at a to affect its own past. " p.282
Indeed, Fred Alan Wolf presents an interpretation of Libets experimental brain data that suggests that we affect our own pasts every time we exercise free will over times shorter than about one and a half seconds. Wolfs interpretation of Libets data makes perfect theoretical sense in Bohms ontological interpretation extended from quantum to post-quantum mechanics where nonlocal communication is possible and one can detect the effects of the preferred frame.
Bohm and Hiley continue with the worn caveat, also mentioned by Penrose in his popular books on mind and matter:
"This would evidently imply a paradoxical situation (e.g. as in the case of a person who killed his own father before he was conceived and in doing so annihilated himself so that he was incapable of carrying out the assumed action)." p.282
Kip Thorne in his popular book, Black Holes and Time Warps give the way out of this paradox. Briefly, the best laid plans of mice and men oft go awry to paraphrase the venerable Scottish Bard, Robert Burns. In the case of autocidal loops they always go awry. We do not have free will to make a time-travel paradox. There is "global self-consistency" around closed time-like world lines (CTC's). The quantum amplitudes for inconsistent histories around closed loop exactly vanish as surely as it is impossible to put two electrons in the same quantum state. Nonlocal form-dependent quantum forces will always intervene to prevent a paradox involving time travel to the past.
Bohm and Hiley then summarize Eberhards theorem that prevents nonlocal communication in orthodox quantum mechanics.
"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." p.282
Note, that Asher Peres, using Bohrs epistemological interpretation, shows that nonlocal communication violates the classical limit of the second law of thermodynamics. That is the post-quantum Maxwell Demon can actually put the fast particles in one side of the partitioned box. Note the qualifier "classical limit". Bohms "beables" are not subject to the uncertainty principle on the individual level. The measurement statistics do, of course, obey the uncertainty principle. David Albert, using a "many-minds" interpretation, shows that certain pairs of non-commuting observables involving the strange loops of Godelian self-reference evade the uncertainty principle allowing "photographs of other worlds". The case is far from closed on these counter-intuitive extraordinary claims.
"For as shown in chapter 7, in statistical measurements the EPR ( Einstein Podolsky Rosen) correlations between distant particles do not make it possible for signals to be sent from one particle to another. More generally any attempt to send a signal by influencing one of a pair of particles under EPR correlation will encounter the difficulties arising from the irreducibly participatory nature of all quantum processes. If for example we tried to modulate the overall wavefunction 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 and complex way. As a result no signal could be carried." p.284
The key word here is "fragile". Stuart Kauffman discusses "random fitness landscapes" ( e.g. maximally compressed, therefore "random" algorithms) on the chaotic side of "the edge of chaos". One can imagine a self-organized critical phase transition in the distribution of the beables "on the edge" in which "fragile" changes to "robust". Indeed, this is exactly what happens when the feedback-control circuit switches between pilot-wave and beable are closed as post-quantum backactivity wins out against external environmental decoherence. This is when post-quantum backactivity reins in Darwinian natural selection. Brian Josephson and co-workers have called this "the biological utilization of quantum nonlocality". Orthodox quantum mechanics with its "uncontrollably" random sequences, limited by Eberhards theorem preventing nonlocal communication, is exactly and profoundly parallel to orthodox evolutionary biology which relies totally on random Darwinian natural selection. Bohms ontological quantum theory, like Kauffman's post-Darwinian evolutionary biological theory, has the "fitness landscape" also used by neural network theorists trying to make more intelligent computers. This is no accident!
Kauffman writes:
"Selection, then, confronts twin limitations: it is trapped or frozen into local regions of very rugged landscapes, and, on smooth landscapes, it suffers the error catastrophe and melts off peaks, so the genotype becomes less fit. Selection may not be powerless in the face of these limitations, for selection can play a role in molding the ruggedness of the landscapes over which the organisms evolve.. But ... it seems doubtful that selection alone can ensure friendly landscapes. Perhaps another source of order is required. Evolution may be impossible without the privilege of working with systems that already exhibit internal order, with fitness landscapes already naturally tuned so that natural selection can get a foothold and do its job. ... Self-organization may be the precondition of evolvability itself. Only those systems that are able to organize themselves spontaneously may be able to evolve further. How far we have come from a simple picture of selection merely sifting for fitter variants. Evolution is far more subtle and wonderful." p. 185 At Home in the Universe
Kauffman then describes the classical biological analog of post-quantum backactivity of the classical beable to its quantum potential that provides the beables "fitness landscape".
"Not only to organisms evolve, but, we must suppose, the structure of the landscapes that organisms explore also evolves. Since selection faces an error catastrophe on very smooth landscapes and can become very excessively trapped in small regions of the space of possibilities on very rugged landscapes, we must also begin to suspect that selection seeks good landscapes ... such landscapes must be highly correlated not random. ... self-organization is a prerequisite for evolvability, ... it generates the kind of structures that can benefit from natural selection. It generates structures that can evolve gradually, that are robust, for there is an inevitable relationship among spontaneous order, robustness, redundancy, gradualism, and correlated landscapes.. another name for ... robustness ... is structural stability." p.188 ibid.
The would-be interstellar warp-drive engineers, who need a controllable giant super-quantum potential of the space-time metric beable, should take note of the "self-organized criticality" of a sandpile in a child's sandbox.
"Big and little events can be triggered by the same kind of tiny cause. Poised systems need no massive power to move massively." p. 236 ibid.
My hypothetical spontaneously self-organizing sentient post-quantum potential-beable system is not "fragile" the way the non-sentient orthodox quantum potential-beable system is.
Let us, reluctantly, but only temporarily, leave the fascinating really new notion of mutable post-quantum landscapes of sentient complex adaptive systems, deformed by the behavior of their attached classical beables, which they also partially guide, back to Bohms way of connecting relativity to the quantum. Bohms way divides the classical world of beables into fermion point particles and boson gauge fields like the electromagnetic and gravitational fields. Remember that ordinary non-exotic fermion particles of quantum spin hbar/2 obey the Pauli exclusion principle i.e., only one particle per single-particle state i.e. "mode", while non-exotic boson fields of spin 0, 1 or 2 units of hbar, can have any number of "quanta" in the same mode. Non-exotic matter obeys the several energy conditions required by the classical blackhole singularity theorems of Hawking and Penrose as described in their new important, but difficult, book, The Nature of Space and Time. Even the spin of particles, in Bohms theory, is not seen as an actual rotation of an extended particle, but of a new kind of mutable "circulatory motion" (Ch.10). Bohms theory contradicts the standard view of spin given, for example, in Vic Stengers conventional (like Gell-Manns The Quark and the Jaguar) book, The Unconscious Quantum. Stenger describes spin as "intrinsic".
"Many properties of matter are fixed and, for practical purposes, permanent ... these include rest masses, electric charge, magnetic moment and spin." p. 79
In stark contrast, Bohm and Hiley write:
".. the intrinsic angular momentum of a given particle is seen to be very much a contextual property, not only with regard to its direction, but also with regard to its absolute value. This is affected not only by the environment supplied by the measuring apparatus, but also by the presence of other particles and by the wavefunction of the combined system." p.228
Nonlocal quantum connections do not permit the equality of all special relativistic frames of reference. This is not as bad as it first sounds because even classical general relativity demotes the idea of the global special relativistic class of inertial frames to purely "local inertial frames" in the tangent space of the curved manifold. The Hubble flow of the expanding space in the standard big bang cosmological solution of Einsteins gravitational field equations for the space-time metric geometry is Bohms preferred global frame in which the several quantum potentials act instantaneously. This preferred frame is operationally defined as that in which the cosmic blackbody photons are isotropically distributed in all directions of space at a definite absolute temperature. One can easily navigate star ships with post-quantum warp drives through self-organized time gates using the readily detectable Hubble flow as ancient mariners used the North Star.
For boson fields
"... the trajectory of the beables corresponds to a single point in the configuration space of the total set of field variables." p. 240
Consider the quantum vacuum of a boson field like the electromagnetic field. It is spatially chaotic, but Bohm and Hiley write:
"... the field is static. This result is surprising as one generally thinks that the zero point fluctuations of the vacuum correspond to some kind of chaotic dynamical behavior ... The ground state energy which we ordinarily ascribe to the dynamic behavior will now be attributed to the super-quantum potential. This is analogous to the particle case in a stationary state ... in an excited state, the energy of the quantum potential enters into the quantum transitions in the same way that the kinetic energy would in the classical limit ... the ground state is not covariant because it defines a favored frame." pp 245-46
I am ignoring ad-hoc dynamical additions, such as Vigiers, from the "sub-quantal level". String excitations may form the sub-quantal level in Vigiers sense. Note the Unruh effect, related to Hawkings thermal radiation from tiny blackholes, in which a probe in constant acceleration through flat space-time detects blackbody photons of absolute temperature determined by the acceleration.
What about excited states of the boson field? Consider a "Fock state" with a single real quantum in it.
"From the actual value of the [beable] field one could not say for certain whether the state is excited or not because the same [classical] field configuration can exist in either state. Indeed, the degree of excitation is determined only with the aid of the super-quantum potential which involves the state of the [objective] whole." p.248
Consider a localized wave packet summation over several classical modes "inside this wave packet the super-quantum potential introduces nonlocal connections between fields at different points separated by a finite distance (unlike what happens in the ground state)."
Again this is for Fock states with a definite number of quanta and random phases. It is not for the coherent Glauber states, i.e. minimum uncertainty wave packets, where the super-quantum potential is zero. I do not know what happens when we squeeze the Glauber state from a circle to an ellipse in the P-Q phase space? Is the super-quantum potential still zero? We cannot have practical star ship warp drives if the Einstein quantum gravity field is in a Glauber type state which does not have any nonlocal connectivity directly connecting "fields at different points". Remember the gravity field is special because it determines the space-time geometry giving meaning to "different points". Therefore, any kind of practical warp drive has to make a really exotic quantum gravity state over astronomical distances with an enormous super-quantum potential. This requires manipulation of some kind of "self-organized critical instability" as in the inflation theory of cosmology. The alleged inflation that flattened out the three dimensional space of our visible universe would be like an uncontrolled nuclear fission explosion. We need the analog to a "nuclear reactor". Penrose does not like the inflation theory and there may be a viable alternative in the vision of post-quantum gravity made more clear using Bohms ideas with spontaneous self-organization put into the foreground rather than hidden in the background.
Bohm's and Hiley's 12.8 "On the meaning of non-Lorentz invariance of processes involving individual beables" is very important especially in view of Roger Penroses note that energy in classical general relativity is "nonlocal".
"... our ontological interpretation leads to Lorentz invariant results in the manifest world of ordinary experience." p.288
Except perhaps for alleged paranormal phenomena and certain kinds of extraordinary experiences by people in altered states of consciousness whether by mind-altering chemicals or meditation.
"and also in the statistical predictions of quantum theory. These two fields cover all the experimental knowledge that we have so far." ibid.
Note Bohm's and Hiley's use of the qualifier "so far". They exclude common biological phenomena because the conceptual link of post-quantum physics to biological phenomena in general is not emphasized as "a form of insight" in their book. It is latent in the background. It is not explicated -- to use Bohms term. Once we make the proper paradigm shift to a new way of looking, all biological phenomena are instantly reinterpreted, in a Gestalt shift of perception as it were, as direct evidence for post-quantum self-organization supplemented by classical forms of "spontaneous self-organization" (e.g. autocatalytic molecular networks), as described by Stuart Kauffman, and tweaked by Darwinian natural selection which "captures chance on the wing" (Monod). "Evidence" does not exist in a conceptual vacuum raw and unadulterated. One mans evidence is another mans irrelevance depending on their theoretical frame of reference.
"But as long as the quantum theory is valid, there is no way to demonstrate this non-Lorentz invariance experimentally." ibid.
This is a corollary to Eberhards theorem, which prevents nonlocal communication in orthodox quantum mechanics. Remember, "post-quantum mechanics" is the larger theory that includes orthodox "quantum mechanics" as the limiting case of effectively vanishing self-organizing "backactivity" from "beable" to "quantum potential" or "fitness landscape". Thus, post-quantum mechanics is to quantum mechanics as general relativity is to special relativity. Special relativity is the limiting case of general relativity when the space-time geometry becomes globally flat with zero curvature everywhere. Thus, there is an analogy between classical curvature and post-quantum backactivity. Both create feedback-control loops. Classical curvature closes the switch completing the feedback-control loop circuit between mass-energy with the classical space-time geometry. Both are beables. Post-quantum backactivity closes the switch completing the feedback-control loop circuit between Bohms classical "beables" of mass-energy and space-time geometry with the quantum mind-field whose range is quantum Hilbert space and whose domain is classical configuration space. Both of these spaces are literally beyond classical space-time geometry, which is now, as we have indicates already, a new Bohm beable. "Space-time" started out as the "arena" with the "beables" inside it. Now "space-time" is itself a beable inside a larger space, a "common pool" of mind-like implicate "active information". Quantum Hilbert space, classical configuration space, classical space-time, all of these spaces are "real" in the ontological sense. This is how I intended the meaning of "Beyond" in the 1975 Space-Time and Beyond written in Paris Cafes with Fred Alan Wolf and Bob Toben inspired by Cabalist-Artist-Poet, Carlo Suares -- although my ideas then were, understandably, not as clear as they are now over twenty years later. Quantum Hilbert space really is a space of implicate information which is essentially "mental" or mind-like. Implicate information is not the same as Claude Shannons information, which is, explicate information. Shannons implicate information is described in Feynmans Lectures on Computation (1996).
"... our ontological interpretation helps bring out a fundamental inconsistency between relativity and quantum theory centered on the question of nonlocality." p.289
Murray Gell-Mann in his book, The Quark and the Jaguar, really takes a cheap shot at this legitimate problem of "nonlocality" calling it "The Story Distorted". In fact he there cites a very influential letter to Under Secretary of Defense, Richard De Lauer, co-written by me with A. L. Chickering, the director of the then key Presidential think tank, Institute for Contemporary Studies, as evidence for his view although he does not mention my name explicitly. However, my connection with that notorious letter is well known having been mentioned in Physics Today in connection with an article by Cornells (my alma mater) N. D. Mermin. It is also mentioned by Jeremy Bernstein in his article on John Bell, "Quantum Engineer" which, I think, was originally an article in The New Yorker. As in the trial of Socrates, I am accused of corrupting the innocence of physics! David Finkelstein, my guest at Esalen in 1975 where I directed the first Physics/Consciousness Research Group, told me it would take twenty years before the physics establishment would forgive me for Space-Time and Beyond. It's taking longer than that! :-)
"... other interpretations of the quantum theory also imply nonlocality, though not in such a clear way..." ibid.
Indeed, E. J. Squires has gone so far as to claim that even Gell-Manns "decoherent histories" alternative requires nonlocality! This is something worth looking into elsewhere. As we shall see in detail below, one can exclude faster-than-light nonlocality from Gell-Mann's model, as he says, but the price paid is very high. The price is the total loss of morally responsible free will.
"... either we accept nonlocality, in which case relativity is not fully adequate in the quantum domain, or we reject nonlocality, in which case quantum theory is not fully adequate in the relativistic domain. Of course, it is also possible that both theories may break down somewhere in the domain in which they meet." ibid.
It is Bohms third alternative that I think is true. The one clear idea that David Finkelstein had when he was my guest at Esalen was that there was always a "third alternative". Post-quantum backactivity giving a sentient self-organizing ability modifies both relativity and quantum mechanics. Penroses link between consciousness and post-quantum gravity is a major clue to solving the puzzle of existence in a scientific way with super-technological spin-off worth trillions of dollars in new wealth to the Earths economy in the 21st Century. That is my "hunch".
Bohm and Hiley say that classical Lorentz invariance breaks down for individual complex physical processes. Nonlocal quantum connections require a unique preferred frame in which the quantum potential acts instantaneously. This suggests a quantum vacuum that breaks the symmetry of the Lorentz group in precisely the same way that ferromagnets "spontaneously" break the symmetry of the rotation group. Lorentz invariance also breaks down at both large and small distances. Thus:
"The most essential feature of special relativity is Lorentz invariance. We already know that Lorentz invariance must be limited at large distances where the effects of curvature are appreciable. We can also give an argument showing that Lorentz invariance must be limited at short distances (probably at the order of the Planck length)." p.289
If Roger Penrose is in the right ball park with his amazing idea that our inner-felt experiences are essentially a post-quantum gravity effect, then the effective breakdown of Lorentz invariance must also happen at much larger distances than the Planck length of 10-33 cm in connection with mental states. There is alleged evidence for this breakdown in the highly debated extraordinary paranormal claims of "remote viewing" especially those with "precognition" as reported in "Project Scanate" especially with Ingo Swann. Whether or not these particular claims are true is not really the point here. The point is that Penroses theory together with Bohms and my "backactivity" extension of Bohm, makes such claims much more plausible. A major reason why conservative scientists reject such claims a-priori is because they appear to conflict with basic laws of physics. That alleged conflict may not be a fact because of hypothetical persistent giant nonlocal quantum connections linking space-like separated mind-brain systems as well as connecting the same mind-brain system at different times. That is, ordinary memory may be the local decoding of messages held in a time-like nonlocal quantum connection. The theory of this would involve extending Cramers "transactional interpretation" and Aharonovs "multiple-time" interpretation to include backactivity so that Eberhards theorem can be violated. I am suggesting that ordinary consciousness requires post-quantum "nonlocal communication" in an essential way. In other words, the hypothesis is that our inner felt awareness violates orthodox quantum theory which is only the inanimate limit of a more general theory in the same way that general relativity violates special relativity over large distances when curvature is important. Even though our universe appears to be spatially flat cosmologically there is significant mixed space-time curvature, and, of course, there is significant spatial curvature in black holes.
Bohm and Hiley imagine a four-vector, whose three-vector spatial part is broken up into many small pieces on a straight line. One makes a Lorentz transformation from the initial frame to a uniformly moving frame. This requires using the metric tensor, which has large quantum fluctuations at the Planck scale so that we no longer have the simple diagonal form, required by special relativity.
"It is clear that what was a simple line vector is transformed into a rather foggy distribution of constituent elements which are not well defined. So the whole idea of a simple Lorentz transformation of one line into another breaks down. The idea of Lorentz invariance only becomes relevant over intermediate distances for which the fluctuations of guv [i.e. the metric tensor] will average out to something relatively small, implying that guv can be taken as effectively constant. ... the Lorentz group may not be as fundamental as we have generally assumed. ... The analysis given in this chapter suggests that even at intermediate distances it may cease to be valid for individual processes involving the beables wherever quantum nonlocality is important." p.290
We can now get a new form of physical insight in Bohms sense. Remember that the only reason that orthodox quantum fluctuations are "uncontrollably random", e.g. Bohrs "Copenhagen interpretation", is because, in Bohms paradigm, the quantum potential acts on its attached classical "beable" without any direct feedback-control mechanism in place. The quantum potential is "fragile" or unstable. This is the physical reason why Eberhards theorem preventing nonlocal communication works. If there is direct feedback-control Eberhards theorem fails, the quantum potential is "robust". This corresponds to a non-equilibrium "self-organized critical" phase transition "on the complexity edge" from chaos to order in which the quantum potential passes from a "fragile" to a "robust" form. This phase transition occurs when random environmental impacts on the "beable" are screened out in the natural course of biological evolution e.g. Stuart Kauffmans book, At Home in the Universe. In our case, the relevant biology is that of the microtubules inside the cells of our body. This is consistent with Brian Josephsons et-al notion that biological systems can "utilize quantum nonlocality" in a new way beyond the limits of orthodox irreducibly random quantum processes. Now what Roger Penrose is suggesting is that the self-organized post-quantum gravity fluctuations in the microtubules are not random. Therefore, the effective fluctuations of the metric tensor are not averaging out precisely in those space-time regions where inner-felt experience is being generated! That is, what Hameroff calls "fundamental space-time" is not at all limited to the Planck scale, but is at the directly accessible "mesoscopic" scale of nanotechnology. This is a bold idea! I could never understand Hameroffs seemingly wild claims until I could reformulate it in my own way using Bohms intuitive picture of the world. We must get away from the epistemological interpretations where statistical ensembles are primary. That is the fundamental error of Vic Stengers book, The Unconscious Quantum. It is also the fundamental error in the recent text book by Asher Peres though that book has interesting things in it. This new form of insight is absolutely crucial to the NASA objective of making a practical interstellar warp drive.
"We are thus led to assume something similar to a unique universal frame, or more accurately, to a universal order of succession." ibid.
Take the Hubble flow of our expanding universe, for example. It is the natural choice, and it is Bohms choice for the "unique original frame" in which the quantum potentials act instantaneously. It is operationally defined by the isotropy, to within the COBE variations of a few parts in one hundred thousand, of the cosmic blackbody radiation. Note that these same photons which define the preferred frame also enforce the classical limit for large objects as a primary source for environmental decoherence on anything larger than a dust particle, e.g. 8.3 and 11.10 in The Undivided Universe. The primordial thermal radiation, which is the after-glow from the big bang, is the "North Star" of the Star Ship Navigator. The absolute temperature of that radiation gives the time from the big bang, and the isotropy gives the preferred state of "rest" on the cosmological scale. This is all operational, pragmatic and positivistic. It is more than the latter of course. It suggests a deeper connection.
"In certain ways such a theory is reminiscent of the Lorentz-type ether theory within which there were large scale objects with structures undergoing processes that would change with velocity in such a way as to bring about Lorentz invariance in terms of frames defined through these structures. p. 290 .... It follows from this sort of argument that Lorentz invariance is perfectly compatible with the assumption of an absolute frame such as that of the ether. Therefore there is no way from the experimental facts alone to prove there is no absolute frame determining a universal order of succession.
However, for various reasons which were mainly aesthetic or philosophical, such a notion of a universal time order was rejected early in the twentieth century." p. 291
So much for the conventional wisdom of Physics 101! :-) Of course the classical ether theory was "very complex and implausible" and Einstein rightly rejected it in 1905. But that was before quantum theory, and what Bohm is talking about is a new ball game relative to the information Einstein had in 1905.
"Nevertheless physics developed in such a way that some features of the ether theory were retained. Thus Einstein in his general theory attributed properties to empty space in the form of the gravitational tensor, guv. Einstein therefore later came to say that his field theories were theories of a relativistic ether that did not involve detailed descriptions of any mechanisms. It was essential for Einstein that such theories should be local and thus he was able to retain Lorentz invariance, at least in regions that were not too large ... But now we have additional reasons to limit Lorentz invariance implying that it does not hold even in the small. And nonlocality further suggests that even in intermediate domains, Lorentz invariance no longer holds for individual processes involving the beables, but is valid only in the manifest domain and in statistical applications of the quantum theory." p. 292
Of Flesh and Ghosts
A Sarfatti Commentary on Self-Organization as Post-Quantum Physics
Work in Progress
Version 0.4
"I, born of flesh and ghost, was neither"
Dylan Thomas's "Before I Knocked"
Stuart Kauffman'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. Kauffman'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 Penroses and Stapps, give corresponding results, the connection of the latter to Kauffman's "spontaneous self-organization" is not as immediately transparent as it is in Bohms version.
Kauffman 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 essay 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 natures 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 Sullivans 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...":
"The world is but a broken toy,
Its pleasures hollow, false its joy,
Unreal its loveliest hue, Alas!
Its pains alone are true, Alas!
Its pains alone are true."
I first sang it in 1957 at Cornell as Prince Hilarion with Jeremy Bernsteins sister Alice as Princess Ida.
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 Kauffmans bold hypothesis is an extension of quantum mechanics to a new "post-quantum mechanics". The seeds for this extension can be found in Bohms final work with Basil Hiley, The Undivided Universe (UU) (Routledge, 1993).
Bohms 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" (a.k.a. "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 (a.k.a. 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 influences 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. Einsteins 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 Maxwells 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 Eberhards 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 Schrodingers 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 keywords for Kauffmans spontaneous non-random self-organization, upon which random Darwinian natural selection operates, is the "two-way relationship between wave and particle". 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, in the simplest example, a quantum wave acting on its attached classical particle. The qualitatively new Bohm quantum force -- not the two-way relationship that defines post-quantum mechanics, describes this. This two-way relationship is the fundamental adaptive feedback-control loop for Kauffmans "spontaneous self-organization". To see this more clearly requires understanding the idea of the "fitness landscape" and how Bohms 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 Bohms 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 Bohms quantum force is balanced by backactivity. Thus, Bohms approach meets both Stapps and Penroses ontological collapse models. Penrose uses the term "orchestrated" which suggests self-organization, but it is only in Bohms 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 Bohms version that demands Penroses link of "orchestration" to quantum gravity with the emission of a single graviton. The work of Lee Smolin, Ashtekar and others suggests that Penroses idea of a "single graviton" is an artifact only of an inappropriate perturbation theory. 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 Penroses idea. His idea is that our inner-felt experiences depend upon an ontological self-collapse of the wave function of the nanometer scale microtubule network subsystem inside the cells of our bodies. This objective post-quantum collapse is triggered by single graviton emission breaking the coherent quantum superposition of alternative space-time geometries. For details of Penroses 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 Aharonovs "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. Asher Peres showed this. 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 E.C.G. Sudarshan and the Gerald 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 Eberhards theorem forbidding quantum superluminal signals works within the context of the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen-Bohm (EPR) experiment embodied in Bells locality inequality which was tested in Aspects 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 Bohrs and von Neumanns. 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 "IGUSs" by Murray Gell-Mann which is an acronym for "Information Gathering Utilization Systems". Bohms 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 loophole 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 disturb 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 nothing 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 Einsteins 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 Bohrs and von-Neumanns. 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. "One-way´means that 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 Bohms quantum force, i.e. the negative gradient of the quantum potential Q, on its particle (beable) that is responsible for conservation of probability current and unitarity which is the basis of Eberhards 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 configurations) 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.
Let's shift our attention back to Stuart Kauffmans brilliant book. Kauffman will be to the 21st Century what Darwin was to the 19th. Kauffmans 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 also opens Pandoras 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 mind-field 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 travelers 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 Drosnins popular book on the alleged code has been rebuked by the scientists he cites as being too sensational. Therefore, we cannot accept Drosnins account uncritically at face value. However, 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 Fleets "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 direct backactivity of the particle (or system of charges and electro-weak fields) supplements the one-way relation of wave on particle 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 Kauffmans 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 Kauffmans "spontaneous self-organization".
"Now that my symbols have outelbowed space."
Dylan Thomas's "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
Kauffmans 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 Bohms 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 Kauffmans sense. Bohms "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. 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, Shannons 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 Bohms 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 Chalmerss 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 Kauffmans "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 Bohms 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 particle." p. 32
You will note that Kauffmans 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. This is a non-classical discrete nonlocal permutation group symmetry described by "Young patterns". These discrete patterns in Hilbert space have a profound influence on the quantum patterns of active information that image the continuous groups that generate space-time geometry according to Felix Klein's "Erlanger Program". 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 a massive Helium 4 atom, 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 (HBT) intensity interferometry. HBT 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 also relevant to the problem of making a practical warp drive for star travel, and I have no doubt that it is essential to Kauffmans "spontaneous self-organization" in autocatalytic molecular networks held far from thermal equilibrium. Kauffmans 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 Stapps book, Matter, Mind and Quantum Mechanics. Stapp does not use Bohms picture, but he comes up with a coarser-grained approximation to it based on extending Heisenbergs 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, its 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 molecules 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 Bergsons "elan vital". 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 Kauffmans 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." p.p. 58-59
Kauffman points out that all the major mass-energy systems in the universe are open. They are in an essentially permanent non-equilibrium because of the cosmological expansion of the universe. This expansion of three-dimensional space provides the work required preventing the universal heat death, which was mistakenly thought to be our final fate in the old physics. Lee Smolins 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 Einsteins classical field equations of the mutable space-time 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 Kauffmans 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 post-quantum computing chip i.e. "PQ-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 Bohms implicate objective wholeness. The incompleteness in Kauffmans 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 Kauffmans computer simulations of Boolean networks near phase transitions "on the edge of chaos." While Kauffman's classical mechanisms are necessary, they are not sufficient to explain life's inner feel or "sentience". 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 landscape", a primary concept in Kauffmans 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
Bohms 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, Kauffmans instant phase transition leading to "catalytic closure", while crucial to the story of life, is not its end. The end of the story is Bohms "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 guiding fitness landscape set up by the quantum potential. There is always an additional stochastic input from the external environment's classical signals causing the system point to jiggle away from its coherent quantum motion. This is how Darwinian natural selection causes mutations with dramatic self-organized critical phase transitions that dramatically morph the quantum mind's fitness landscape. The "Aha! Eureka, I found it!" peak experience of Abraham Maslow's model is a good example of such a phase transition in a sub-space of the total configuration space of the living material body. The fitness landscape globally coordinates the immune system as well. This explains psychosomatic phenomena, e.g. Bill Moyers's recent book and TV series.
"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 bath water 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 Bohms 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 Bohms.
"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 (e.g. see Stapps 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 Bohrs 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 what 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 Kauffmans 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. As I already mentioned, but it's worth repeating in the Age of HIV, 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 propellant 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 space-time 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 Bohms 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 Peats 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 Kauffmans 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 propellant-free drive for spacecraft.
Many Worlds?
Is there a "universe next door"? If so, how do we open the door?
Bohm and Hiley give a critical analysis of the several variations on the theme of non-Bohmian, but still ontological, "many worlds", or "parallel universes", as a way to understand the meaning of quantum mechanics. They point out a deep conceptual split between Everetts original theory which is more like "many-minds" in a single material universe, and DeWitts later theory which is one of "splitting" material universes. At the very outset in this discussion we need to clarify the difference of the many-worlds theories of quantum mechanics and the "chaotic inflation" theories. The latter has "baby universes" that split off from our universe exploding out of the quantum foam of metric fluctuations at the Planck scale of 10-33 cm or 1028 ev. The difference is that the many-worlds theories deal with the splitting of the quantum wave function into ""branches" or "channels" which are complex-valued functions with ranges in Hilbert space and domains in the configuration space, which in quantum gravity is the Wheeler superspace. In contrast, baby universes, as described, for example, in Lee Smolins The Life of the Cosmos, are parts of a multiply connected 3-geometry with detached pieces that split off from the original. For example, a single point in Wheeler superspace would be a 3-geometry with wormholes as well as detached pieces that represented the baby universes. The different points of the superspace are a bit like DeWitts alternate "splitting universes" that are "next door". But, in contrast, each branch of the wavefunction of the universe has values on every separate point in Wheeler superspace. The bottom line is that there are serious problems of internal self-inconsistencies in every version of "many-worlds". They certainly do not deliver what they promise. Hawkings quantum cosmology assumes a many-worlds interpretation which could be its Achilles Heel.
"there is no single generally accepted version of the many-worlds interpretation. .... Everett and DeWitt differ significantly ... p. 296 Everetts approach to the many-worlds interpretation ... emphasizes the inclusion of observers as purely physical systems within the theory." p.297
This is a good feature of it since my post-quantum extension of Bohms theory does the same thing. In this sense there is a denial of traditional Cartesian mind-matter dualism in which mind is beyond the physical. But there is an ontological physical dualism since the mind field i.e. quantum potential, has important qualitative differences from classical fields and sources which are the "beables".
"Everett ... assumes that the universe as a whole including all observers exists objectively and is described completely by a vector in Hilbert space." p. 297
Like Bohrs epistemological "Copenhagen interpretation", which says there is no objective space-time picture of individual processes possible, Everett throws out the "beables" which are not the same as the "hidden variables" of the Vigier "sub-quantum domain". This distinction is often not made in popular accounts such as Stengers book The Unconscious Quantum.
"he wants to attribute subjective states to the observers which are in perfect correspondence with some aspects of the material universe and therefore of Hilbert space. This sort of idea has been widely called psycho-physical parallelism ... memories are contained in ... some aspect of the physical state of the observer ... Deductions can then in principle be made about the subjective experience of the observer by examining the contents of the memory." p. 297
This is not the same as the post-quantum field of active information, which, in the presence of backactivity, becomes the actual field of inner-felt experiences.
"Everett proposes that we can extend this model of an observer by considering him to behave like an automatic machine possessing sensory apparatus couple to registering devices capable of recording past sensory data as well as machine configurations. He further supposes that the present actions of the machine are determined not only by its present sensory data, but by the content of its memory as well." p.297
I would add advanced information from the relative future of the present moment of the living bio-machine because of the nonunitary nature of post-quantum mechanics. The level of reliability of the alleged, highly controversial, advanced "precognitive remote-viewing" information is, for most people, very much less than that of retarded information from past memories except for the short-time Libet effect that Fred Alan Wolf is currently writing a paper on for the rapidly-approaching Vigier Conference (August 23-29, 1997, York University, Toronto).
Remember the initial motivation of many-worlds is to only use the linear unitarily-evolving Schrodinger equation (or relativistic generalizations) without any non-unitary nonlinear collapse its solutions in a measurement. This is a promise that is not kept in any variation on the many-worlds themes. In other words, objections to Bohms theory on the basis of "extra assumptions" apply also to all forms of the many-worlds approaches. Bohms theory has the key advantage that it is manifestly self-consistent. Let us recall that "unitary-evolution" means conservation of quantum probability current in the configuration space of the many-particle/classical electro-weak-strong-gravity field complex extended system which is the "beable". Post-quantum mechanics with backactivity feedback-control loops between the quantum "active information" pattern and its attached "beable" is a fundamental mechanism for "spontaneous self-organization" and is essentially non-unitary. The lack of conservation of quantum probability current is the measure of creative novelty in the sentient post-quantum system. It also evades Eberhards theorem and allows "nonlocal communication" in the sense defined by Stenger in The Unconscious Quantum. Eberhards theorem was the quantum barrier against paranormal effects like precognitive remote viewing. This quantum barrier has been breached. According to Roger Penroses hypothesis, any post-quantum gravity system with "orchestrated self-collapse" has "inner feel" as described by Stapp. Penroses orchestrated self-collapse is a less precise way of describing spontaneous self-organization as a feedback-control loop in post-Bohmian terms.
"It is clear therefore that if we add no further concepts to the quantum theory (e.g. such as well-defined particle positions as we have done and if we do not allow collapse) then there is no way in what Everett has said thus far, to describe the fact that a definite result is actually obtained in each case." p.298 In order to avoid the need for bringing about a definite result for the measurement by means of a collapse of the wave function ... Everett assumes that each part of this wavefunction corresponds to a definite state of awareness of the content of the observers memory." ibid.
This is why Everetts original many-worlds theory is really a "many-minds" theory with no material splitting of the actual universe such as does happen in the creation of "baby universes" in Hawkings quantum gravity. Hawkings theory does