(This post I have extracted from parts of Chapter 10 of “NEW PHYSICS AND THE MIND” by Robert Paster. The book is the synthesis of Mr. Paster's two-year effort researching the historical development and scientists' latest thinking regarding the mind, the brain, cognition and perception, atoms and matter, quantum theory, gravitation, and particle physics.)
The mind has played a role in physics since the earliest days of quantum physics. The Fifth Solvay Conference in 1927 featured a debate between Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein about whether the mind and consciousness are (Bohr) or are not (Einstein) part of physics. Einstein's position has dominated mainstream physics for decades, but the battle simmered on for the entire twentieth century.
Roger Penrose, a prominent University of Oxford mathematician who has made major contributions to modern physics, in his book "The Emperor’s New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics" speculates that consciousness involves access to the universe’s idealized concepts; these are the Platonic ideals of centuries-old philosophy. In Plato’s formulation, it is not our typically understood physical world that is real; what are truly real are forms and ideas. The physical world is a mere shadow of the real world of forms and ideas.
When the mind perceives one of the mathematical concepts of Plato’s worldview, the mind is making contact with this world. Our experience of grasping a concept is a holistic experience of seeing at once, as a whole, the solution to a problem. Or, as Penrose cites, it’s Mozart discussing how he seizes at a glance an entire musical composition: “It does not come to me successively . . . but in its entirety that my imagination lets me hear it.”
Penrose proposes that before our mind reaches these kernels of understanding, a physiological process within the brain allows the brain to form these ideas. The process involves physical brain activity—rapid trials of combinations of growing and contracting dendritic spines, which stretch out to the synapses that separate a nerve cell from its neighbor. So our brain has a window of opportunity within which to toy with possibilities for dendritic spine construction. How does the brain settle on its ultimate choice?
In part, the construction is influenced by the physiology and chemistry of its environment. So the construction depends in part on our emotional state and on the preexisting state of our brain and its connections. But what provides the core decision-making criterion? How is a final dendrite construction settled on when our mind grasps a concept or glimpses a new symphonic work?
Here, Penrose takes this even further. His answer is quantum gravity, which is also the (still not found) answer to the question of how general relativity is to be reconciled with quantum physics.
Penrose has frequently collaborated with Stuart Hameroff, who has extensively studied microtubules, which give shape to our neurons and through which neuronal chemicals pass. Hameroff, tracing the evolution of life, marks the incorporation of microtubules into the modern cell as taking place about 1.5 billion years ago, as part of a general symbiotic merger of previously independent organelles (cell parts). A billion years later, during the Cambrian period which began 540 million years ago, there was a vast and abrupt emergence of varied lifeforms—the Cambrian explosion—which Hameroff attributes directly to the early precedents of consciousness that microtubules permit.
Penrose and Hameroff propose these microtubules as our brain’s link—through orchestrated reduction—to the collapse (reduction) of the quantum wave function: many neuronal microtubules, acting in concert (orchestrated), create an act of consciousness linked to the quantum physical world…
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Wednesday, January 9, 2008
The Origin of Life - Another Hypothesis
(From an article in the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph 01/09/2008)
Life on Earth began on a radioactive beach, a scientist claimed today.
According to computer models, deposits could collect at a beach's high tide mark in sufficient quantity to trigger fission reactions
The sifting and collection of radioactive material by powerful tides could have generated the complex molecules that led to the evolution of carbon-based life forms - including plants, animals and humans.
While radiation may seem an unlikely candidate to kick-start life because it breaks chemical bonds and splits large molecules, it also crucially provides chemical energy needed to generate some of the basic building blocks of life.
Zachary Adam, an astrobiologist at the University of Washington in Seattle, has suggested the collection of radioactive material on a beach as a new theory for the origins of life - to be added to the existing long and varied list of hypotheses.
One is its emergence from a "primordial soup" of simple organic chemicals accumulated on the surface of bodies of water within the hydrogen-rich early atmosphere - formulated in the 1920's by English geneticist J. B. S. Haldane and Russian biochemist Alexander Oparin.
Others include early life forming in inorganic clay, the initial energy coming not from chemical reactions but from sunlight or lightening and the arrival of microscopic seeds of terrestrial life on chunks of meteorites or comets, and the intervention of a divine, intelligent designer.
In work highlighted in this week's New Scientist magazine, Mr Adam suggests the more powerful tides generated by the moon's closer orbit billions of years ago compared to today could have sorted radioactive material from other sediment.
According to his computer models, deposits could collect at a beach's high tide mark in sufficient quantity to trigger the self-sustaining fission reactions - as occur in natural seams of uranium.
Mr Adam demonstrated in laboratory experiments that such a deposit could produce the chemical energy to generate some of the molecules in water which produce amino acids and sugars - key building blocks of life - when irradiated.
A deposit of a radioactive material called monazite would also release soluble phosphate, another important ingredient for life, into the gaps between sand grains - making it accessible to react in water.
Mr Adam told the New Scientist: "Amino acids, sugars and [soluble] phosphate can all be produced simultaneously in a radioactive beach environment."
Life on Earth began on a radioactive beach, a scientist claimed today.
According to computer models, deposits could collect at a beach's high tide mark in sufficient quantity to trigger fission reactions
The sifting and collection of radioactive material by powerful tides could have generated the complex molecules that led to the evolution of carbon-based life forms - including plants, animals and humans.
While radiation may seem an unlikely candidate to kick-start life because it breaks chemical bonds and splits large molecules, it also crucially provides chemical energy needed to generate some of the basic building blocks of life.
Zachary Adam, an astrobiologist at the University of Washington in Seattle, has suggested the collection of radioactive material on a beach as a new theory for the origins of life - to be added to the existing long and varied list of hypotheses.
One is its emergence from a "primordial soup" of simple organic chemicals accumulated on the surface of bodies of water within the hydrogen-rich early atmosphere - formulated in the 1920's by English geneticist J. B. S. Haldane and Russian biochemist Alexander Oparin.
Others include early life forming in inorganic clay, the initial energy coming not from chemical reactions but from sunlight or lightening and the arrival of microscopic seeds of terrestrial life on chunks of meteorites or comets, and the intervention of a divine, intelligent designer.
In work highlighted in this week's New Scientist magazine, Mr Adam suggests the more powerful tides generated by the moon's closer orbit billions of years ago compared to today could have sorted radioactive material from other sediment.
According to his computer models, deposits could collect at a beach's high tide mark in sufficient quantity to trigger the self-sustaining fission reactions - as occur in natural seams of uranium.
Mr Adam demonstrated in laboratory experiments that such a deposit could produce the chemical energy to generate some of the molecules in water which produce amino acids and sugars - key building blocks of life - when irradiated.
A deposit of a radioactive material called monazite would also release soluble phosphate, another important ingredient for life, into the gaps between sand grains - making it accessible to react in water.
Mr Adam told the New Scientist: "Amino acids, sugars and [soluble] phosphate can all be produced simultaneously in a radioactive beach environment."
Tuesday, January 1, 2008
More Musings On The Origins Of Life
This article from the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph summarizes ideas, theories and discussions arising from a meeting of scientists from many parts of the world to discuss "Quantum Effects in Biological Nanostructures", regarding the possible role of quantum mechanics in the origin of life. The writer quotes one of the expositors ideas as:
“….. British physicist Dr Paul Davies……..said that quantum theory fills a missing link in existing models of the origins of life, of which there are many. While all traditional theories suggest chemistry provides the hardware of life, quantum mechanics could provide the software, he said. "Today the cell is regarded not as magic matter but as a computer - an information processing and replicating system of astonishing precision."
In the beginning, Dr Davies speculates that once "Q life", in the form of self replicating information at the atomic level, got going on Earth, this paved the way for replicating chemicals, the best known of which is DNA.
"What we don't know is whether life has evolved over billions of years to the "quantum edge" to exploit those tricks, or whether it's the other way: quantum mechanics was the midwife of life and a few quantum tricks are left as a hangover," he says.”
For the full article, click on the link below.
“….. British physicist Dr Paul Davies……..said that quantum theory fills a missing link in existing models of the origins of life, of which there are many. While all traditional theories suggest chemistry provides the hardware of life, quantum mechanics could provide the software, he said. "Today the cell is regarded not as magic matter but as a computer - an information processing and replicating system of astonishing precision."
In the beginning, Dr Davies speculates that once "Q life", in the form of self replicating information at the atomic level, got going on Earth, this paved the way for replicating chemicals, the best known of which is DNA.
"What we don't know is whether life has evolved over billions of years to the "quantum edge" to exploit those tricks, or whether it's the other way: quantum mechanics was the midwife of life and a few quantum tricks are left as a hangover," he says.”
For the full article, click on the link below.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)