Empiricism is going fine; just putting something else related here…
Life and its experience, in higher forms, came along way later, so it is an afterword, yet, like all other things in existence, it may shed some light on what constitutes the universe, since it is of the universe. What comes to mind are both the holistic and the detailed sides of the brain, something to consider, although what follows is but a very raw attempt at explaining life in general…
LIFE EXPLAINED?
It is, of course, that atoms and molecules make it up, through a casual nexus of physical-chemical reactions; however, this observation cannot be equated to an “explanation”, for it seems not to be plainly reductive, and so we might delve deeper, to look for something else going on, too, for there may very well be a background behind what the chemicals do.
According to the quantum realm, “matter” is only composed of potentiality—it only becomes matter when it’s “real-ized” by interaction.
In a stable configuration of matter, such as would be so in the inanimate, all the quantum uncertainties may be effectively statistically averaged out, this thus ever being deterministic; but in the case of the statically unstable but dynamically stable configurations of the animate, the “lively” features of the underlying quantum structure have a chance to surface to the macroscopic level; that is, to life, and I wish I knew how.
The electric dipole moment of biomolecules might be the ordering parameter for the corresponding macro-quantum system, and so this could result in a change in quality for that macro configuration. There is the particle and there is the wave—either one forced on us by our observations, being jointly known as the ‘wavicle’, all three states of which are probably truly not the actual reality.
There are, strictly speaking, perhaps, no objects that are identical with themselves over time—the temporal sequence remains open. Nature is often no longer seen as clockwork, but only as a “possibility gestalt”, the world occurring anew each moment. The deeper reality from which the world arises, in each case, acts as a unity in the sense of an indivisible “potentiality”, which can realize itself in many possible ways, it not being a strict sum of the partial states.
What remains unchanged over time are certain properties that find expression in the laws of conservation of energy, momentum, electrical charge, etc., these necessarily being closer to the basis of all. It appears to us, though, that the world consists of parts that have continued from “a moment ago”, and thus still retain their identity in time; yet, matter really only appears secondarily as a congealed potentiality, a congealed gestalt, as it were. Physical phenomena may not made of basic building blocks but are perhaps made of “elementary processors”, which are complex-valued field “operators” that depend on time and location. These generate certain overlappings of correlated multi-dimensional wave fields that are propagating through time, fields of possibility, whose intensity is a measure of the probability of an object-like realization, this intensity being very sensitive to the relative phase of the overlapping partial waves.
There are no point masses then, but only smudged particles, such as we suspect in the space-filling representations of the distribution of electrons in the shells of atoms—a ‘cloud’. There is a relationship structure that arises not only from the manifold and the complicated interactions of the imagined building blocks of matter, but also one that is substantially more inherent and holistic, again such as we see in quantum physics. So, there is form before substance, relationality before materiality. It’s hard to imagine pure relationships existing without a material substrate, but, consider electromagnetism: it fills space—without a material substrate, but is probably still physical, or consider a music CD—its singers and instruments encoded in a relationship structure. The material CD is only a carrier, of secondary importance, its information being primary, an analogy to particles and waves’ descriptions. Impressions of realizations are left in our 3D world by the gestalt that “lives” in the multi-dimensional spaces of quantum superpositional possibility.
Quantum systems of many quantum states are not then so much systems as they are holistically differentiated process structures. However, considering them as systems, they are complex, meaning here that such systems cannot be reduced to simpler systems without breaking connections; thus there can be no clear reductions, for, as in chaos theory, there are embedded instabilities—and if we disregard even the tiniest correlations then we may severely distort the result. We can no longer just analyze the parts but must try to use much more sophisticated statistical methods, these being more than the simple probability to which we are accustomed. Waves can reinforce, weaken, or even cancel out, this all being a kind of generation of partial disconnectedness by intermediate extinctions, such as in the way a biological organism forms from a single cell by successive cell divisions, which do not occur by parting, but by repeated formation of semi-separating cells walls; however, this is only a very rough analogy.
Via metabolism, life forms have a sufficiently powerful energy pump, one that could conceivably generate states of thermal disequilibirium in molecular systems embedded in certain substrates that would excite certain low-frequency collective modes of vibration with great power, perhaps via mechanisms similar to Bose-Einstein condensation, the electric dipoles coming into play as an ordering parameter; however, this is not a conclusive, direct connection. Information appears only in the animate, and is furthermore exchanged, the meanings somehow combining to make sense in some nonreductive process—the relational reality of life happening at this semantical level of information exchange.
Life is not mindless; it is inspired; its meanings cannot all be discovered by observation, but truly by participation. Life’s entities embrace one another: cell, organism, species, and biotope. A living creature is more like a poem, revealing further dimensions and expressing new properties at every level of organization: letter, word, sentence and [uni]verse.
Somehow, perhaps, the quantum states that continue on further in the quantum superposition have reached more efficiency and effectiveness, with all the paths being tried out, just as in the 95% efficient photosynthesis methods actually seen, using fermo-lasers, and so that’s what collapses out of it, the more productive paths that last, ones usually with the least amount of effort, too.
Or not, if reductive.
