The Mystery of Life

If you follow my threads, the general attitude about life I take is a) relational b) ecological c) biochemical d) dynamical and e) emergent.

These ideas or concepts cohere in everything that happens; my writing this thread inter-includes within my singular experience a metaphysical 'relationality', which is 'ecological', in that multiple different objects inhere within the expressed function of another object; it is biochemical, because I am, like you, made up of molecules (which is always relational/ecological), and am governed by a chemistry which is essentially dynamical (about relaxing energy constraints) - which is to say, hovering at 'the edge of chaos' in a constant attunement process between an organic structure built from an entropy resistant symmetry dynamic that processes energy according to a "holoarchic" logic that entrains past chemical-structural symmetries to newer ones, always with regard to the "enclosure" that all living systems are defined by i.e. membrane in cells, skin in animals.

The last point is "emergent", which, for instance, scientists speak of the mind as "emergent" upon brain processes. This view is very general, and more or less unproblematic to most people. With chemistry, and the transformation of molecules through interaction with other molecules (or relevant quantum particles) energy, we know, becomes matter, and matter becomes energy. Matter is also inherently dynamical; it is changing, constantly, because the force of nature which makes life possible - electromagnetism - is inherently volatile, changing, because the electrons which move through carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, phosphorus, and sulfur (the 6 basic atoms of life) are constantly degrading and needing to be replaced, which is a constant non-stop process. Every year 98% of a body's atoms are replaced. This process is so general that it constitutes a basic "symmetry" principle for bodily development, one which, given the mathematical probabilities involved, would imply a highly complicated logic that keeps life moving in the same way towards the same goal i.e. its teleodynamism.

Physicists call this by the name of "particle replacement symmetry", which is basically the most basic symmetry that can be ascribed to the organic process, but is a little sparse on the details of what sort of configurations underlie the self-organization process itself. Biophysicist Mae Wan Ho, for instance, believes that "the organism is, in the ideal, a quantum superposition of coherent activities over all space-times, this pure coherent state being an attractor, or end state towards which the system tends to return on being perturbed". This is more or less the cannon. But what sort of process allows this to happen?

“The life cycle is a fractal hierarchy of self-similar cycles organized by the characteristic space-times of the processes involved. All real processes have characteristic spacetimes. The heart (10-1m) beats in a second, nerve cells (10-4m) fire in a tenth of a second or faster, and protons (10-15m) and electrons (10-17m) movie in 10-12 to 10-15 s. Cells divide in minutes, and physiological processes cycle in hours, a day, month or a year. This may well be the reason space-time tied to real process is non-differentiable and discontinuous. The coherent fractal hierarchy of living activities arise because processes with matching spacetimes interact most strongly through resonance, and also link up to the entire hierarchy. That is why biological activities come predominantly in cycles or biological rhythms. In the language of quantum physics, the organism is a superposition of coherent quantum activities over all space-times. The possibility for cycles in the living world coupling and linking up to cycles in the physical universe is surely why life is possible, and indeed some would argue, as Whitehead did, that the entire universe is alive.” – Mae Wan Ho, Meaning of Life in the Universe: Transforming, pg. 450-451, World Scientific, 2017

A Living Universe

Another article of faith I subscribe to - based upon all the evidence from biology and phenomenology - is that life is constructed in a 'point-counterpoint' dialectic, which the ancient Chinese beautifully captured with the Yin-Yang.

When it comes to the living process, it seems 'idealism' cannot be separated from the form itself, as the superposition of quantum states Ho mentions basically corresponds to what Jung called the 'archetype', which is basically, and its most fundamental sense, a relational quality of being that emerges, at its very origins, as a biochemical dynamic that becomes, overtime, complexified along different pathways that have begun to generate singularized phenomenologies via the formation of a nervous system.

Through the nervous system, or the electromagnetic "flows of energy transformation" between neurons, a singular "proto-self" begins to form, and this self more or less functions as an intermediary between the biodynamical transformations relevant to metabolism and homeostasis, and an emergent 'order of qualia' which correspond to the different ways that neurons can 'capture' semiotic meaning in the world about it. The world of electromagnetic phenomena - or light - becomes represented as vision; the world of motion becomes represented as sound; the world of molecules become represented as smell, etc. This single nervous structure, the neuron, is able to extract the relevant "indentations" which act upon it in the external world, and in the process, construct a facsimile of the relations in the form of a nervous system that genetically "locks in" the modes of being which successfully adapt to external perturbations.

Do you see what kind of exquisitely logical sensitivity we can bring to how our minds function? Long ago, the amphioxus evolved what the neurologist Todd Feinberg and the biologist steven Mallet consider the "beginning of consciousness", albeit, they mean a form of immediate representation of sensory experience in a brain that 'acts back down' upon the systems activity to provide it a more sentient guidance.

But what is this life? Biologists and other scientists study life, but it seems to me they completely take for granted Thomas Aquinas popular insight: that existential sense of knowing you exist, and how such a knowledge of self completely transforms the way and nature the self represents its beingness in the world. Too many books have been written which fail to take this conception seriously, which is unfortunate, as what could be more interesting than how the wonderful order discovered by the sciences - from physics to the neurosciences and ecological study of human development -grades until it reaches a stage where reality shifts into another gear, and the phase shift we naively assume with being "human", changes beyond anything that could be considered expected. How astonishing! How utterly, and incredibly unexpected! It is this quality of being thought so impossible which makes the phase shift seem unreal, and yet, the logic, if followed through, would seem to imply that the mystics and sages know something astonishing that would make physicists and biologists and psychologists so sure of "how things work" rethink their position.

Something discoverable - explainable, lies in acts of levitation, or whatever else seems to be occurring. An alignment - a correlation between ontological states encoded within the biodynamism of the body's self-structuring - allows the life which flows through our veins to take on and appropriate the space around it, such that life itself could be said to be "interacting with itself" from two different centers of consciousness: from the mind of the 'magus', and the external reality projected from his own consciousness outward into reality, so that the "object" can be seen to be a "participant" in the life process itself, and why not? If physical reality - or the world of humans - becomes represented within their brainmind as a "living thing" - is it not, then, reasonable to include this "object" into the ontological process itself, and allow it to become as real as anything else?

Mae Wan Ho thought so. Chinese culture retains images of flying monks, which Ho has mentioned as a real possibility in her book The Rainbow and the Worm. She wonders whether love, and the recognition of ones own oneness with everything else, induces a shift in biological functioning which she calls "zero-entropy". In this state, the physical world becomes an aspect of your being; the 'other', finally recognized to be a part of the self.

“Thus, a coherent sage may well be living in a truly timeless, spaceless-state beyond ordinary comprehension.” – Mae Wan Ho, Meaning of Life in the Universe: Transforming, pg. 70, World Scientific, 2017

If such a person existed, I would want to know how he did these things and what was happening to the body when he did it.

Wouldn't it be cool to know?

a reply to: Astrocyte

. She wonders whether love, and the recognition of ones own oneness with everything else, induces a shift in biological functioning which she calls "zero-entropy". In this state, the physical world becomes an aspect of your being; the 'other', finally recognized to be a part of the self.

“Thus, a coherent sage may well be living in a truly timeless, spaceless-state beyond ordinary comprehension.” – Mae Wan Ho, Meaning of Life in the Universe: Transforming, pg. 70, World Scientific, 2017

If such a person existed, I would want to know how he did these things and what was happening to the body when he did it.

It cannot be done by anyone - because there is no one separate - separateness is an illusion created by thought - words make believe there is a me in time. But there is only ever what there is.
Where is time now?

The assumption is that there is something other than what is appearing - there isn't.

There is no other - there is only what is happening. That means there is no you and what is appearing - because that makes two!
The separate you is an illusion - there is no one inside - there is no inside or outside - there is simply what there is.

a reply to: Astrocyte

The skin derives from the same germ layer as the nervous system,and is essentially an extension of the nervous system, much like your eyes are actually an extension of your brain,they are not really a separate tissue.

Your skin is the largest organ in the body and is a giant sensory array. This is how we come into contact with the "outside world".

This contact (along with the other senses which again are extensions of the brain) is the feedback for the universe. This point of localized information and neural activity is where our individual consiousness arises from.

The activity of Mirror neurons in our development show that our "us" is a product of our environment. This is analogous to the way our DNA responds to the environment and how it expresses.

Before we mapped the human genome it was thought we would have 2 million genes. Turns out there are only 22,000. It is the response to the environment largely by the altering of the shape of proteins (in response to the geometric stresses of the environment) that allows our body's to function.

No man is an island. We have more bacterial cells living in us than our own. And they are the other major contact point with the environment besides our skin and brain extensions. The microbiome is realistically an organ. The bacteria communicate within and across species, and seemlessly communicate with our own cells.

This colony of other called the microbiome is really me. Trillions of bacteria that populate my gut, and regulate digestion, communicate directly with my brain, alter hormonal function etc. That is me.

The microbiome is a trillions of separate organisms acting as one. Sort of like our cells acting as one. This unity takes place through membrane potentials. The separate bacteria contact each other and through their membranes information is passed along that alters DNA to change functions. This is largely the way cells work too.

My point is the fractal nature of our makeup. The cellular level is DNA - membrane. The organism level is Brain/CNS - skin/PNS. The species view would be collective conscious (represented by society partially) - each separate being/consiousness.

That organism level or organization and integration includes the microbiome which is technically not us from a DNA level.

If the microbiome is us. Maybe everything else is us too. And as the microbiome has a sort of collective consciousness to aid in the larger organisms normal function, maybe we do to. Each of our consciousnesses (which arise from a collective of cells known as the body) are likely to form a larger collective, though we may not know it just as those bacteria that make up the microbiome don't know it.