Uniting spirituality, psychology and physics, how can your interest flag?

A reference in this regard would be nice. I know very little about the quantum world. — jgill

Try reading three threads I posted awhile back at this site to get a feel for the concepts, which seem to be unprecedented:

Qualia and Quantum Mechanics
Qualia and Quantum Mechanics, The Sequel
Qualia and Quantum Mechanics, the Reality Possibly

Subatomic phenomena of the quantum scale as traditionally construed might behave so differently than objects at the classical scale because of an exponentially compressed distance accompanied by likewise contracted time, giving them almost instantaneous rates. The more energy that is contained in a system at the quantum scale, the more time contracted its causal effects, all else being equal. The sun generates relatively non-time contracted effects because most of its energy is dissipated into kinetic energy of the classical scale. Brains by contrast, with the elaborate quantum machinery of their unique biochemistry, are like quantum suns, radiating entanglement effects on a large scale while overriding classical time dilation. Maybe this accounts for the introspective perceptions which lead to a panpsychist impression of the way consciousness works, the "all is mind" illusion.

But equations do not determine reality. — jgill

I think my equation might be getting at something relatively fundamental though, at least in the context of current physics. Does wt=d/f imply that time dilation is directly proportional to distance or dimensional extension and inversely proportional to wavelength and frequency, while distance is directly proportional to wavelength and inversely proportional to frequency or energy?

Is the classical scale categorically disjuncted from the quantum scale because of time dilation? Is energy directly proportional to time contraction?

This possible mechanism for abiogenesis has been proposed to Gary Enfield many times in this thread. He has no good response. He just goes on saying that, since we don't understand all the principles of how abiogenesis through self-organization actually works, that's proof that it's impossible. You're just beating your head against a wall. — T Clark

I had a feeling you guys were going in circles at this point lol

Please return to metaphysics. The real deal is a challenge. — jgill

I wonder if physicists and mathematicians popularize their ideas just to set the public up for a mocking lol You dismiss my analysis just because I didn't utilize decimals? We all can comprehend the basic concepts of physics without a calculator. I've taken calculus and quantitative chemical analysis, I know some stuff.

By implication, it took 3,200m years between the time that the first cell emerged and the first multi-celled creature came to exist. However - all the steps in that evolutionary process were cells — Gary Enfield

I think this might be a flawed assumption. It is completely possible that the first carbon residues were not the protocells which gave rise to the Cambrian explosion. When considering timescales involved, it is completely valid to consider this as possibly more than three billion years.

I also think pinning ourselves to the concept of an amino acid or nucleotide is presumptuous. They wouldn't have evolved from a solution containing only their basic building blocks, but rather in many increments. You might want to consider the existence of a partial amino acid or nucleotide, and that some may have evolved prior to cells, in protocells, and then in the complete cell. All the evolution doesn't have to happen within a single medium, in one fell swoop, and considering the process to be essentially determined by holistic function is fallacy unless some evolutionary principles exist that have not been discovered. We lack a record of the missing molecular links, but it hasn't been disproven that they existed, we just haven't found comparable combinations so far.

As you mentioned in an earlier post, our thermodynamic model of the atom could be suspect, and a refined quantum physics might revise chemistry into something like more morphable energy flow instead of generated by fixed three dimensional structure, necessitating a major adjustment to our conception of how reactions happen and what the range of possibility is.

Scientists have quite easily synthesized single-tailed phospholipid membranes from their basic building blocks in the lab, which combine, form spheres and pinch in two spontaneously, so the basic template of cells has been proven to readily evolve, and probably emerged separately on numerous occasions.

I am not trying to dismiss what you say, I am crudely trying to hone-in on the factors that would allow your theory to work - but I hope that I have illustrated the tip of the iceberg, and why may people seem skeptical of this approach, without being able to offer anything better. — Gary Enfield

True, we have not generated what is obviously living from what is indisputably nonliving in the lab, but one would expect it difficult to extrapolate modern cells back to at least 550 million years ago, when the Cambrian explosion happened and macroscopic eukaryotes emerged. But the first signs of fossilized protocells are roughly four billion years old. Three and a half billion years of membranous evolution and colonization is like a zillion bazillion years on the human scale, and we have plenty of evidence that humans evolved from hominids in a few million years, so it seems that its only a matter of how, not if.

It has been documented that amoebas can form symbiotic relationships with bacteria they engulf after only a few weeks of laboratory exposure. Genetic testing proves that the nucleus is descended from archaea, mitochondria from bacteria, and chloroplasts from cyanobacteria, all containing at least remnant DNA. The cytoplasm is full of both DNA and RNA, though we haven't discerned much of its function to this point. Cells are a teeming genetic ecosystem more than a kind of machinery, undeniably having arisen from membranes combining, dividing and engulfing at their characteristic speedy pace to proceed from the chemically simple to the more complex.

How the first cell originated is a mystery and challenging to theorize because the environment must have transitioned from enough chaos to drive a complex metabolic cycle and towards a tamer environment conducive to diversely intricate cellular evolution. This sort of transformation would have been exceedingly rare, but almost inevitable on that timescale.

The best hypothesis I know of thus far is the deep sea hydrothermal vents which etch microscopic wormlike holes connecting larger nodes into surrounding rock while emitting large quantities of organic molecules and fueling a nutrient cycle in likeness to cellular metabolism, with hydrogen ion gradients and exposed metals for catalysis. The first cellular material would have been a film adhering internally to the rock. All this required were phospholipids, a fairly simple combo of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and phosphate if I recall, bonded at near boiling temperatures and studded with sticky organic molecules, to get going. Single-tailed phospholipid membranes self-assemble into cells when full and are extremely porous, so would soon have become overflowing with all kinds of organic molecules. This is probably where primordial metabolism originated.

In a relatively rare event, some of these hydrothermal vents (or whatever the similar energy source was) must have become less agitative, perhaps from seismic activity or distribution by way of ocean currents, so that primordial cells with their primitive metabolism got established in much more favorable conditions. This is where protocells would have become a complex ecosystem, with increasing symbiosis until something like stromatolites formed as the first multicelled colonies.

I'm not a researcher of course, but based on what I've read that's my preliminary thinking!

This says nothing, of course, about the possibility of the existence or non existence of things that travel at speeds above c, it just rules out those things having accelerated to those speeds from sublight speeds. Einstein was always clear that fixing c as a constant for all frames of reference was an assumption, and one that would be finally justified by empirical results, as it has been numerous times. Dimensional analysis has a role in physics, of course, but as far as I'm aware it's just a basic tool to avoid simple errors, and to use if for that, you need to get the dimensions right from the beginning. — jkg20

What's conceptually interesting to me about the wt=d/f formula is that the perceptual and structural unity of intuitive spatiotemporality is completely dissolved, with both space and time being equivalent to something like pressure, temperature and volume in Boyle's gas law equation (PV=nRT): purely definitions of emergent properties in substance, and only real by analogy with macroscopic structure.

If you think of spacetime as not the fabric of reality but instead a pair of descriptive variables only real by analogy, this suggests that motion is not essentially either spatial or temporal, though it is hard to imagine logically. Space and time are direct and inverse correlations that don't exceed the constraints of modeling formulas in which they are utilized, not in any way essences.

If motion is fundamentally supraspatiotemporal, it seems plausible that light can be part of a large spectrum that extends in the direction of more rapid speeds, while the acceleration of massive bodies towards light speed constitutes a very narrow range of material occurrence. Velocity and acceleration as we have thus far measured them could be like a sliver of the motion spectrum. Atomic orbital shifts in response to photon/electron interactions might occur faster than light, advanced waves may propagate such that slower events are affected by backwards in time causal reactions, quantum entanglement becomes explicable, and the existence of tachyons may be not improbable.

Snarkiness as anticipated lol I corrected the Planck's constant value, yielding d(squared)*m/t. It still works: d=w, d=acceleration*time/f. The assumption is usually made that the speed of light is a constant maximum, which this shows can only be justified empirically if at all, not in principle. The equations don't support it. I recall reading that Einstein himself never claimed the speed of light as an absolute maximum anyways, but I've demonstrated that it is radically hypothetical based on fundamental equations. You can quote me on that!

Whoops!, substitute via distance rather than time and you get the same final equation: wt=d/f. I got the units of Planck's constant incorrect - m(squared) kg / s, but doesn't change the result with appropriate cancelling.

Are you even qualified to venture an opinion on this subject - what science qualification do you have? — Tom Storm

I've got the science and philosophy foundation from college, with a bunch of additional reading on the subject. I'm not a professor if that's what your curious about. I'm as qualified as anyone with a liberal arts education and a philosophy degree plus a lifetime of meticulous study.

Is there one robust documented example of anything spiritual existing? — Tom Storm

I think its obvious that spiritual phenomena exist, but I presume all of this can be explained naturalistically. As one of the more mundane instances, statistically significant correlation between the brainwaves of meditators has been recorded with EEG, an objectively observed synchronicity.

Do you have a link to the source or sources for your description? I've read "Life's Ratchet" but I wouldn't mind going deeper. — T Clark

The source is me! lol If you want to get the whole deal, check out my blog at philosophyofhumanism.com, particularly the posts Quantum Biology, The Origins and Evolution of Perception in Organic Matter and The Nature and Human Impact of Qualia. I admit my writing isn't quite professional polish, but I think you'll find the ideas interesting. Most of my postings are chapters from a book I wrote titled Standards for Behavioral Commitments: Philosophy of Humanism, available for free download at same site.

I have no problem with the suggestion, but it's only a theory, and does nothing to explain the origin of RNA or any ability to reproduce in isolation.

It also doesn't explain the origin of the proteins that are the actual work horses of life, which can only be conceived to naturally experiment with each other once they exist. — Gary Enfield

I only raise souls or ghosts because they often come up, and these ideas can stand in as place holders for pretty much any claim of access to a different realm outside naturalism. — Tom Storm

If an evolutionary account of life's origins is valid, this is what it has to account for and what chemistry experiments have to generate in some form:


Rudiments of life began as some form of reaction cycle, refined billions of years ago in conjunction with growingly complex membranes and carbon-based molecules until evolutionary independence from fully inorganic features of the environment arose. Though all the molecular parts of recycling biochemical loops were interdependent, these first membrane-parsed solutions, even when their protocells were clumped together, must have been more like an ecosystem than a mechanized factory, with chemical bonds breaking, forming and adaptively transforming as energized quanta of matter flowed at the nanoscale.

This streamlining of dynamic equilibrium was punctuated at times by key evolutionary events, simple subunits of molecular ecosystems coalescing into more complex macromolecules, segments of reaction pathways refined by natural selection for greater efficiency until stabilized as persisting, relatively large three dimensional structures. Evolving macromolecules would have become loci of intramembrane ecosystems, primary drivers of pathways in energized mass that brought overall chemistry into their orbit.

Apex molecules must have reached a stage where structural integrity was no longer especially vulnerable to decomposition via any surrounding chemical reactions, but instead mostly recycled from smaller building blocks of matter or sustained by repetitiously drawing energy out of atoms and radiation in the environment, graduating from basic chemistry to what we might call functional mechanisms. This would have been the beginning of metabolism, primordial macromolecules utilizing quantized matter for replenishment, as nutrient sources.

At some stage, molecules in these metabolic systems gained the capacity to not just generally exploit environments for energy, but also precisely replicate external subunits, which was a huge evolutionary advance, surpassing mere utilization of various smaller molecules to the point of finely controlling their concentrations, regulating nutrient supplies as the first primitive enzymes, a sort of inanimate farming based around feedback mechanisms. Paralleling this outcome, some molecules became capable of introducing to the environment stretches of their own structure, built out of surrounding molecules, the ancestors of RNA.

How these two threads of evolution - enzymatic and self-replicative activity - gelled into a stable genetic system is unclear, but judging from the nature of modern cells, it seems this process must have been complex, as molecules currently carrying out these activities span a rather broad spectrum. The following all exist in sizable amounts: self-replicators and the enzymes that catalyze their reproductive processes, partially self-replicating enzymes in likeness to the ribozyme, and the much greater quantity of enzymes not directly involved in self-replication, but which produce components of recyclitive biochemical pathways.

If we can regard this evolutionary process as having an overall direction rather than serendipitous cooccurrence, a claim about relative progress vs. relative chance which pends further research into modern cells and their processes of adaptation, it seems biochemical pathways generally settled into a division of labor, where some molecules are specialized for self-replication, some for metabolism, and relatively few a limited capacity for both. The most sophisticated forms of this cellular behavior, which are inextricably linked in modern cell types by biochemical pathways, seem to have first evolved in ways that were isolated from each other, in separate membranes, with the fate of macromolecules, already partially streamlined for function, conjoined in symbiotic relationships when cells engulfed each other without digestion as in the case of what became nuclei, mitochondria and chloroplasts.

At any rate, self-replicators advanced from modest regulation of intracellular environments to such precise control of biochemical ingredients and pathways that molecules of RNA and DNA can be analogized to hubs of information storage, the primary blueprints for cellular biochemistry, with DNA molecules duplicated almost exactly upon mitosis and templating most of the astounding variability in an organism’s physiology.


In my opinion, an alternative could not possibly exist, as the intermediate steps will have to be mechanisms of this type, unless we are going to assume some magical hocus pocus causality. Its a matter of refining theory so that our knowledge of causation is accurate, which may admittedly include an element of what is commonly regarded as the spiritual. Spiritual causes are not immaterial, they are natural and must participate in evolution defined broadly as organized, self-selective change in substance. If spirits drive change in substance, that will eventually show up as a facet of the theory of evolution.

Those scare quotes immediately put us in the territory of metaphysics, like or not. I said Enrique's suggestion seemed like pseudo-science to me, perhaps it's not, but to be convinced I would have to se reference to something published, other than a Forum contributor's opinion as I'm in no position to judge it. — Wayfarer

That information is drawn from a great book called Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology by Johnjoe McFadden. It talks about much of the recent research into quantum phenomena in nature and is a good general introduction to quantum physics for the layman. That's the best reference I can come up with.

the 'hard problem' which appears as the 'neural binding problem' in neuroscience — Wayfarer

This resolves the neural binding problem:

In exactly what way consciousness emerged via evolution is a mystery, but we can be fairly certain about what had to obtain in order for it to be possible. Initially, electrical properties in aggregates of tissue such as the brain needed to be robust enough that a stable supervenience of electromagnetic field (EMF) was created by systematic electron fluxing. Quantum effects in molecules of the body are sensitive to trace EMF energy sources, creating a structural complex of relatively thermodynamic mass containing pockets of relatively quantum biochemistry integrated by sustained radiation.

EMF/quantum hybridization is likely responsible for our synthetic experience of qualia, how we perceive unfathomably minute and diverse fluctuating in environments as a perpetualized substrate, perturbed by its surroundings but never vanishing while we are awake and lucid, the essence of perceptual “stream of consciousness”.

Nonlocal phenomena are ever underlying the macroscopic substance of qualitative consciousness, its EMF properties as well as bulked matter in which nonlocality is partially dampened, and quantum processes in cells interface perception instantiated in bodies with nonlocality of the natural world which is still enigmatic to scientific knowledge.

Quantum features of biochemistry have likely been refined evolutionarily so that mechanisms by which relative nonlocality affects organisms, mechanisms of EMF/matter interfacing, mechanisms targeting particular environmental stimuli via functionally tailored pigments along with further classes of molecules and cellular tissues, and mechanisms for translation of stimulus into representational memory all became increasingly coordinated until an arrangement involving what we call ‘intentionality’ emerged, a mind with executive functions of deliberative interpretation and strategizing, beyond mere reflex-centric memory conjoined to stimulus/response.

Qualitative consciousness precedes the degree of unification we experience as humanlike awareness, for qualia can exist and perform a functional role in consort with quantum effects and additional gradations of nonlocal reality while an organism is almost entirely lacking the centralized control we would classify as intention.

Perhaps include electric charge distribution as an EMF mechanism and you've got a viable model, with intentionality being an emergent property of neuromaterial structure infused by qualia, which as I said earlier are additive superpositions amongst entangled waves and wavicles, not an epiphenomenon but a facet of matter's causation in similarity to shape and size.

You can't reject this idea while giving consideration to the hard problem of consciousness unless you're totally screwing around lol

But as new evidence accumulates that cannot be reconciled with the existing paradigmatic theory, the best way to describe all the evidence at hand begins to grow again into an unwieldy patchwork of the main paradigmatic theory and all of the exceptions and special cases needed to be made and used to handle the anomalous evidence, until at some point that patchwork becomes so complex that other competing theories, previously rejected as less parsimonious than the paradigmatic one, are now more parsimonious than the old paradigm plus all of its exceptions, and it becomes rational to adopt the best of them instead of trying to cling to the old paradigm and its mess of special exceptions. — Pfhorrest

The rivalry between geocentrism and heliocentrism is a perfect example of this. Heliocentric models existed pre-Aristotle, but it seemed more parsimonious to most ancients that what was not known from the vantage point of Earth should be regarded in practical principle as fundamentally oriented to it, though this view required some convoluted notions to explain retrograde motion etc. As Western religion and the idea that the cosmos was designed came to increasing predominance, it made sense to view the planet as located within an enigmatic empyrium: what was not knowable at the time was not intended to be known, and the geocentric model also prevailed. Then telescopes came along and it was proven by direct observation that the planets revolve around the sun in a vast universe of analogous composition. It turned out that our sense of conceptual aesthetism and economy was flawed, totally reconfiguring humanity's intuitions about nature. Theoretical contemplation always has a rationale, but it can be radically in error.

the great danger and prevalence of self-deception — Pantagruel

There is a big difference between information and knowledge and I think that the main difference is the way in which knowledge is a more thorough exploration of ideas, especially in terms of personal belief. — Jack Cummins

For me, belief or lack of belief has never been self-deception so much as involuntary ignorance. I knew absolutely nothing about history when I was a child and didn't care in the least until I played a video game with encyclopedia-styled entries on historical topics. This factual content made an impression on my knowledge without really impacting me on an intellectual level, though I picked up some subtle strategies of behavior from the structure of the game. With time to reflect and read as an adult, it dawned on me that history, the analysis of precedent, is key for effective interpretation of the world, and I became absorbed in picking up as much comprehension of the previous two hundred years and its main antecedents as possible while integrating it with my philosophical background.

So from personal experience, it seems that three stages exist: carelessness about knowledge, dabbling accumulation of fact such that a general picture of reality takes shape semiconsciously, and active synthesis for the sake of optimizing one's grasp of truth. The procession from one stage to the next is like a phase change in matter, encountering inertial resistance at the beginning to exponentially progress, finally reaching a place where escape velocity is achieved and everything simply makes intuitive sense. The real challenge is in the phase changes, its almost like a shift in cultural awareness or perhaps even personality that is very difficult to actualize without a conducive environment and some well-crafted conditioning. I think my cultural milieu was designed to make me thoughtlessly ignorant, and I overcame that during a few periods of my life by way of gaining more independence to pursue personal interests and simply think in a self-directed way than is typical.

Natural curiosity+adequate resources+lack of environmental inhibitors=intellectual growth. Resources have become more than sufficient in modern society, and curiosity is a given, but some severe environmental inhibitions are in place, and dealing with that is where the real challenge presents itself.

That seems pseudo-science to me, and plainly dualistic, to boot. — Wayfarer

What about additive superposition amongst entangled wavicles or "quantum resonance" seems like pseudoscience? Its a testable hypothesis regarding a possibly observable property of matter. Simply the idea of hybridized wavelengths generated by interpenetrating quantum fields, with implications for spiritual aspects of evolution.

There is no reason to be happy lol

But the issue I’m raising is the significance - if any - of the inner experience of organisms, the ‘what-it-is-like-to-be’ - a bat or any other kind of creature. And the reason why is that there’s a strong tendency to dismiss that latter quality or attribute as secondary or ‘epiphenomenal’ or derivative, in evolutionary accounts. — Wayfarer

Well, since you brought up consciousness, my favorite topic...

My hypothesis is that qualia are the product of additive superposition amongst entangled wavicles. This generates layers of overlapping entanglement structures spanning many molecules that produce what I call coherence fields. Its basically a kind of quantum resonance analogous to the blending of shades in the visible light spectrum, except much more various and complex (including what is true subjective color). These resonances produce the experience of images, sounds, feels, all the basic sensations, which are organized within the modular mind, firmly attached to the brain in humans, such that self-awareness and meaning as we know them can exist.

If this is accurate, qualia are an emergent property of matter on par with shape and size, and qualitative experience or "what-it-is-like-to-be" emerges from large scale, complex modularization of this qualia-infused matter. The mind's qualia are not then an epiphenomenon, but just as causally fundamental as shape and size.

Qualia and qualitative experience in this account can exist in forms besides what we traditionally know as terrestrial biology, and this provides conceptual space for factors of preternatural spirituality and divinity to be considered as evolutionary influences, what I think is an argument you are making.

So the experience of meaning in all its dimensions can be measured as matter, but this matter contains elements of consciousness at a very basic level, to the extent that matter might be regardable as intrinsically psychical. I think this will resolve mind/body duality and the hard problem without eliminativist rejection of what has traditionally been considered phenomena of immaterial substance.

So the mystery of the origin of life is very real. — Gary Enfield

Cell division is chemically simple and automatic. In experiments, phospholipid bilayers pinch in two when they contain enough molecules, without any enzymes or biochemical machinery required. Mitosis and meiosis are regulated versions of what is at base a completely spontaneous process. Cellular mechanisms may actually constrain rather than induce the multiplication of cells.

The amount of recursive order vs. disorder in macromolecules might be overestimated by intro theory. If you look at a ribosome (image of ribosome subunit), drawn from a post in the thread "Nothing to do with Dennett's Quining Qualia" at this forum, the complexity implies that every single one probably contains much variation. Life's processes seem at base messier and more haphazard than the picture obtained from your average textbook. When I look at this, I see an RNA tangle of a kind that could have arisen as the first protocellular colonies combined and divided at least millions of times per day.

A plausible quantum mechanism of biochemical evolution has been proposed: atoms within macromolecules existing in superposition during which they are in multiple states at once, meaning that some molecules are in hundreds or even thousands of different configurations simultaneously, greatly reducing the span of time necessary to reach optimum adaptation by naturally selected collapse of the wave function.

Missing links such as the ribozyme have been discovered, hybrids of protein and RNA segments that catalyze their own replicative processes.

This does not rule out some kind of preternatural intervention, but mechanisms by which evolution can occur, whatever its conscious or nonconscious causes, are being proposed and discovered.

I will grant you that in the case of the universe, it's not so clear. I think you can make a good argument that since flatness is necessary for complexity, and complexity is what you would expect from a designer, the existence of a highly improbable attribute (flatness) that is exactly what we would expect to see had the universe been designed is strong evidence for either a designer or a sufficiently large and variable multiverse. — RogueAI

Why can't the flatness of the universe simply be a consequence of its rotation? When we toss pizza dough it flattens. The planets vertically compress by a small amount as they rotate at a relatively slow speed.

The mystery, therefore, is how the complexity of the first living cell could be achieved before the only mechanisms that is able to manufacture it - another living cell. — Gary Enfield

Some fun facts along these lines...

Despite centrality of sunlight-requiring photosynthesis to the biosphere, it was found that prokaryotic organisms survive in many climes, wherever energy can be harnessed by chemistry. Theories were formulated that considered the possibility of extremophile prokaryotes as the first lifeforms, a likely option considering turbulent conditions of an Earth that, 3.8 billion years ago, was still in volcanic apoplexy. It became common currency that early Earth was profuse in nitrogen and carbon dioxide gas as well as water, with paltry amounts of ammonia and methane, conditions prevailing in the interface between the atmosphere and Earth’s surface, but due to chaos induced by tectonic shifts and magma emissions, it seemed likely that life would have burgeoned in more stable deep ocean environments, though an energy source had to be available.

This led scientists to deep sea hydrothermal vents surrounded by teeming populations of single-celled life. Near boiling ocean water heated by the molten mantle beneath Earth’s crust froths around fissures that inject hot gas as well as simple subunits of macromolecules such as amino acids and other carbon compounds into nearby rock, eroding microscopic pores within their bulk. Chemicals circulate in and around these tiny chambers that act like nodes between wormlike tunnels connecting this collective chemistry to the outer ocean. It is postulated that dissolved gases such as carbon dioxide, hydrogen and nitrogen, as well as organic molecules and proton gradients from hydrogen atoms stripped of electrons all subsist in the supercharged environment, conditions that may be sufficient to produce a metabolic cycle without the presence of membranes, as networks of linked pores could be the total requisite structure, functioning like a congregate of cell walls. Metal ore surfaces exposed within the chambers may catalyze energy transfer, acting the role of primitive enzyme. It is an intriguing model, one that seems to explain what could be bacterial descendants living in droves nearby, and scientists recently committed to testing it.

An experiment was designed that placed a solid clay brick with microscopic pores and channels in a sealed cylinder of aqueous solution. A tube pumped heated flow of water through the clay in such a way that circulation was achieved, and further tubing was assembled to introduce gases and organic molecules to the solution in a concoction that mimicked postulated conditions of hydrothermal vents with high fidelity. Scientists planned to set the apparatus in motion and determine whether larger molecules can be formed. Efforts such as this may disclose much about how life may have irrupted into existence.

It is not hard to imagine a sort of membranous biofilm adhering to interiors of the rock, becoming studded with as well as inhabited by macromolecular clusters conjuncted to the nutrient rich cycle, then differentiating into primitive cells that expanded in range, complexity and diversity as the first prokaryotic lifeforms. Each evolutionary step is improbable on its own, but metabolic self-sufficiency together with mutational self-replication only had to materialize once or rarely, and billions of years of naturalistic trial and error in prokaryotic time is like a macrocosm of the universe.

I feel that if there is a probability distribution than can describe possible states of a system for waves (superposition) that is indeterministic, then that makes our lives indeterministic from a point of view. Our brains are also electrical and light literally moves around in waves inside our minds too. It would make make our thinking indeterministic too? — Paul S

In my assessment, it would make the measurement of those physical processes in terms of current quantum mechanics extremely probabilistic, but the processes themselves are more deterministic, though perhaps not absolutely deterministic. We shall see. The fate of free will hangs in the balance lol

Einstein once wrote that ‘God does not play dice’ when responding to a letter from the German physicist Max Born. Born argued that at the heart of quantum mechanics is randomness and uncertainly. — Paul S

It is impossible to tell at this stage of science if existence is deterministic because perturbing a system in order to measure it changes the state of the system. If you measure a matter wave at a particular location, everything around it including what is beyond the context of measuring device gets driven out of its corresponding state and into an alternative state in a thus far unfathomably complex process. Theory will have to be advanced enough to register the full range of singular and plural effects before we can discern if happenings are at base chaotic. We may never know if this is even possible.

From my reading, I get the impression that quantum occurrences must be more deterministic than modeled by graphs of total statistical probability.

Something that's been on my mind quite a bit lately is something some people devote their entire lives to, the question of what space is made of if anything. — Paul S

The way I currently see it, empty space doesn't exist, only fields consisting in amorphous, fluctuating concentrations that seem to be quantized in various ways and which create waves as they interact. I'm not familiar with theories of quantum gravity, but as far as I know gravitational fields are the farthest reaching we have observed, those that interfere across the greatest distances, so solar systems are like components in a holistic structure analogous to the mutual tension between particles within atoms. Even outer space has a structure due to the interference interactions of gravitational fields.

As fields interfere, amounting to the motions within and amongst them, they generate shape. These shapes are not absolutely three dimensional, four dimensional, or any precise dimension, but rather amorphous in an extremely complex way, though within some conditions they get close enough to a specific dimension that we can model them as such.

From what we know so far of gravity, I think it can be modeled effectively with spacetime. The microscopic concentrations of substance that form interference patterns at various scales, quantum etc., can be stretched into all kinds of different dimensional forms, but in some circumstances match specific kinds of dimensionality very closely, such as a three dimensional crystal or a four dimensional wave packet in the double-slit experiment.

The tricky aspect of modeling dimensionality is that causation proceeds backwards as well as forwards: I'm referring to what are called advanced and retarded waves (for a discussion on the topic I found informative, look at this thread in the philosophy of science section: Determinism, Reversibility, Decoherence and Transaction. The full range of possible field interactions is atemporal, and I'm not aware that scientists have a grasp of how single concentrations of substance propagate at a huge range of different rates simultaneously, or while interfering in reverse so to speak.

I'm not sure what sense to make of neutrinos that move through conventional matter at the speed of light while not interacting with it, or where dark matter and energy fit into the picture.

According to the edition of the Britannica Encyclopedia I have, Descartes held that gravity was not magnetic but was instead second matter squeezing out "globulars" (spherical particles) like cannon balls towards the earth and somehow this was coordinated in a circular way by a universal "vortex". — Gregory

Whoa, that idea is bizarre! I'm not extremely familiar with the details of relativity theory, but I've read that Earth experiences incoming gravitational waves with a postulated quanta called the graviton. Maybe these waves participate in compressing the gravitational field and matter of our planet. The galaxy certainly rotates like a vortex. I guess he wasn't totally off his rocker!

Descartes's gel -like "second matter" is analogous to Newton's quintessence, although the former is a physicality understanding. — Gregory

It has occurred to me and additional posters on this forum that dark energy could be a sort of quintessence, with properties such as nondilution upon expansion that set it apart from the rest of materiality, almost like its own pervading phase state. Even if its not fundamentally distinct, it might play the role of an aether in relation to many physical mechanisms.

Could aether inherently use wormholes? Newtonian space and time are purely incorporeal, while aether as quintessence is neither actual not potential but some type of emanation, a fluid that has aspects of material and immaterial ( "simple") existence. Bell's inequalities are explained by only saying that time works differently than we thought at the quantum level. But using wormholes in a fluid might be a better way to answer the dilemma. — Gregory

To clarify this point, I think it might be flawed to think of aether as a completely separate medium through which wavicles travel, for this constitutes a kind of unparsimonious substance duality. In my estimation, wavicles must be made of the same essential "aetherlike" substance except moving and concentrating in a relatively local configuration. Maybe it makes sense to think of a tunneling wavicle for instance as not traveling through a wormhole but actually being the wormhole, smeared out supradimensionally while it transits as induced by charge differentials and perhaps additional entanglement forces of synchronicity.

Whether macroscopic objects can travel through a wormhole is probably a different issue.

Are you sure that these "amorphous field contours" are not just theoretical? What physicists know as a "field" is just a map of something they don't really understand. Any "amorphous field contours" are part of the map, which is a map of probabilities, so they are only as real as a probability is real. — Metaphysician Undercover

According to my limited knowledge at this stage, the quantum wave function is a probabilistic approximation to the relationship between initial conditions and the final orientation of real wavicles. These real wavicles are perturbations in what is more fundamental, something like fields as per your definition, with the concept of a field capable of eventually including all possible nonlocal causation within its scope. I'm not sure if anything can get more basic than a unified field model encompassing the entirety of nonlocality, but anything further would make future humans badass!

It would coordinate our understanding of time as a conscious species of animals — Gregory

...such as the double-slit wavicle, which could perhaps consist in a flash of qualia existing for a fraction of a second, or human consciousness as the integration of a diversely entangled qualia substrate, or a thunderstorm as subsisting in the mind of Zeus! lol

These aren't full-fledged ideas, just me awkwardly riffing around on a somewhat goofy morning (six cups of coffee wAAAAAAAAAA), so your insights are much appreciated, that's the whole point, trying to find a way forward!

I have no idea how "charge distribution" might work. But it could be similar to my own understanding of how quantum-scale particles can act like waves in a fluid medium. — Gnomon

By charge distribution I mean as in a thunderstorm, where the cloud and the ground are positively charged with negatively charged atmosphere between them. The storm creates charge peaks on multiple patches of ground, then lightning strikes develop as electricity materializing at some of these spots synchronizes with that coming down from the sky, these prongs of current stairstepping towards each other until they connect and a surge of electricity is transmitted. All of this of course happens in a fraction of a second, undetectable to the naked eye.

I'm hypothesizing the double-slit experiment as analogous to a thunderstorm, where the emission event and absorbing material give rise to clouds of negative charge (from large quantities of electrons), presumably separated by a cloud of positive charge induced between them (the opposite of weather). The apparent "interference pattern" would then not be due to interference at all, but rather produced by patches of negative charge that form a symmetrical pattern on the absorber surface because of the symmetry of the experimental setup. As the emission device revves up, the absorber charges are activated, setting the statistical distribution of particle transmission. Electric charges loosely parameterize the motion of a "chosen one" absorption event and the emission event as they approach each other in a similar stairstep fashion and link, with an individual particle stretched linearly as it travels through at least one of the slits (maybe all of them somehow?), flowing along the microscopic lightning bolt's path and making contact with the screen in a seemingly random manner, at a particular point. (Maybe this wouldn't be the reverse of weather but instead similar somehow, I'm not sure.)

In the brain, current flows through neurons as the relative positivity/negativity of charge between their internal and intermembrane space alternates. This process is regulated by the cyclical flow of ions into and out of the axon. Action potentials throughout the brain are happening trillions of times per second so that the organ is like a highly organized electrical storm. These orderly periodicities of charge disequilibrium are presumably what generates brainwaves, and in my hypothesis also provide the medium of nonlocality within which entanglement effects occur, similar to a thunderstorm and the double-slit experiment. This electrical charge nonlocality within the brain is strong and persistent enough that relatively large biomolecules within cells can entangle as per the OP, far beyond the double-slit experiment's limits (whether or not the particle happens to travel through multiple slits simultaneously I suppose).

Nonlocality of an electrically charged field establishes entanglement relationships between particles in a way that is infused into the matter itself but also supervenient on local positions. This supervenient integration that is intrinsic to matter while it consists in electric charge differential generates "qualia" or additive entanglement amongst particles, and with sufficient complexity in emergent organization can result in qualitative perception. Essentially, charge distribution participates in piloting particle interactions via entanglement within many circumstances, and this shows up in quantum mechanics as statistical probability.

Not a complete explanation for consciousness, but perhaps contains some basics.

In this account, the wavicle doesn't fill up the double-slit chamber as if transmitted like aether, or else why wouldn't the phenomenon be easily observed with particles under all naturally occurring conditions, an existence of total superposition? In this model, holism of charge distribution within matter is the entanglement mechanism, instead of highly constrained particle position or state and the accompanying paradoxes of action at a distance.

Maybe a compromise between the wave and particle models is possible that sustains realism, a wavicle which warps into different, sometimes higher dimensional shapes depending on electric charges and similar such globally active factors in its environment.

We can say that the change to one object is equivalent to the change in the other object, when they interact, but there is really nothing which moves from one to the other, only an interaction of fields. — Metaphysician Undercover

I agree that your idea represents what is going on at a more fundamental level, but the dynamics of wavicles are real, as amorphous field contours, and so are of course valid as fodder for empiricism. Particularities are constitutive properties of fields and more effectively connect with our conceptual intuitions as the situation presently stands, but maybe experiments and mathematical principles will someday be devised that get closer to the essence of fields instead of residing at a more holographic sort of level.

The point is: Is qualia possible in a deterministic world or not? — SolarWind

The way I see it, elements of qualitative experience that philosophers call "qualia", however you approach them, are an indisputable fact of existence whether or not the world is deterministic.

Suppose we lived in a world where atomic stability came not from quantum mechanics but from some other (deterministic) mechanics. If there were human-like creatures in such a world, would they not have feelings or would "classical" humans be philosophical zombies? — SolarWind

Quantum mechanics is a more fundamental theory of reality than classical mechanics' absolute determinism, and might explain the root of all feelings, an intrinsic property of nanoscale entanglement and superposition amongst matter, equal in status to size, weight, color, shape and the like. I think quantum mechanics will eventually prove negligibly indeterministic even at the level of single events, but that's just speculation. All humans feel probably because this is an essential feature of matter, but feelings can of course be had in a huge host of ways. I felt like a zombie when I got out of bed this morning, and since I also thought about qualia, I guess I'm a philosophical zombie at least once in awhile lol

In the absence of obvious proof that the electron is diffracting through multiple slits simultaneously, I think my alternative explanation for the measurement problem might actually be accurate:

In the double-slit experiment a wave packet or "wavicle" travels through one or the other slits, but either option is equally probable across many trials, though fundamentally deterministic (thus far immeasurably so) in relation to a single wavicle. An apparent "interference pattern" is not generated by diffraction through the slits but rather produced by peaks of charge distribution along the absorber's surface rendered symmetrical by the slits, which initiate the various trajectories of wave packets in coordination with the emitter charge and determine the statistical range of possibility for endpoints. — Enrique

Its worth noting that the experiment requires very specific molecules to work at large masses, so hidden variables must exist. It works with a bucky ball, and there's no way one of those is divided in two by the slits, transcending its chemical bonds completely, to then recombine on the opposite side and end up as a point on the screen.

I'm suggesting the primary hidden variable is charge distribution in the double-slit chamber that materializes prior to the emitted particle reaching the slits, which parameterizes statistical distribution while determining the particle's trajectory in the same retarded/advanced wave manner as a lightning bolt. Do you find this explanation at all compelling?

The key result of the paper is that only one electron is diffracted at a time, meaning that the electron wave must be interfering with itself, meaning it must be going through both slits. — Kenosha Kid

How can a diffuse wave interfere with itself to form a single particle on the screen? It doesn't make any sense. What is the direct evidence of diffraction at both slits simultaneously?

I suggest, if you cannot take my word for it, that you read the article I sent you. It's written more for non-experts. — Kenosha Kid

Is an "interference fringe" the interference pattern on the absorber or something else?

So an electron beam interferes with itself as it travels through a crystal or when divided by a metal filament, that's pretty certain. But the interference pattern can't account for why the particle shows up as a point on the screen instead of a wave. Looks like the double-slit experiment works with molecules having as many as two thousand atoms, so the postulated "interferes with itself" mechanism has not reached its limit, but seems dubious to me nonetheless.

To get the dark and light bands of the interference pattern, you have to have multiple sources that can reinforce or cancel each other out. You can't get this kind of pattern with a wave and a single slit, and you can't get this pattern with point particles and multiple slits, as these would just produce multiple copies of the same thing you'd get with a single slit.

Putting a detector behind one of the slits basically gets you back to the pattern you'd get with point particles. The wave has to get past the detector or not, so go through one slit or the other. You can't get interference this way. You can only get interference if it goes through one slit *and* the other. — Kenosha Kid

Sorry this nonexpert is getting so nitpicky, but I'm curious. Does observable evidence exist that the particle travels through both slits during a single trial, or is that only an assumption? I've read an "interference pattern" results from molecules with up to a thousand atoms. It seems to me these must be very much like point particles compared to an electron, so claiming they travel through both slits could be problematic. For the relatively large molecule at least, the endpoint on a florescent screen is then produced by retarded/advanced waves linking up approximately halfway along the path determined by one of the slits, not both, meaning the wavicle stretches more linearly rather than spreading horizontally, though over many trials the particle is equally likely to travel through either slit.

But it depends on the mathematical specs of distance between the slits, slit width, particle size, charge distribution, etc. Don't have the foggiest notion of exact proportions.

Failure to get the interference pattern from molecules larger than a thousand atoms could be the result of the molecule being too large to be influenced by an absorber's charge as induced in consort with the emitter like a thunderstorm, not a "collapse of the wave function" decoherence caused by entanglement properties at the slits. The sensor might somehow affect trajectory through either slit (in separate trials) even though it only records the particle at one of them, so that decoherence in this case is not a feature of the particle itself. This could imply that decoherence is not as large a constraint on particle behavior as might have originally been thought, allowing more quantum degrees of freedom to be anticipated for molecules in nature.