Wave/particle duality? I acknowledge that nature does not at all mirror the double slit experiment, but matter has intrinsic wavelength as far as I know, correct me if that isn't accurate.



Merely speculating, but I think its important to avoid excessive bias towards a precedential model of brains as no more than a bundle of neurons wired together. The brain is actually 90% glia, which are closer to conventional, nonconducting cells in their structure, provisional of function that may differ dramatically from neuronal streamlining for purposes of electricity transmission.

My hypothesis is that large assemblages of neurons are responsible for generating standing waves in the brain as measured by an EEG, maybe with specialized regions providing mechanisms of amplification and pulsing linked to states of awareness. Then all kinds of different glia comprised of extremely fine-tuned biochemical ingredients, matched in a multitude of ways with more than ten thousand different types of neurons as locally active functional units, contain the additive superposition entanglements of microscopic coherence fields distantly resembling photosynthetic reaction centers, coordinated to large-scale radiation in such a way that qualia are subtly modulated in miniature quantum processes thus far evading our laboratory instruments.

So basically a massive amount of tiny neuron/glia complexes tailored for very specific sensitivities produce the additive resonances of individual qualia, and our integrated qualitative experiencing is an almost unconscious blending of these into the more holistic standing wave structures. Qualia biochemistry might be so context-specific that even large sources of radiation do not register, just like substances are odorless, sonic frequencies can be inaudible, saturation of the atmosphere with radio waves causes us no issues, prolonged exposure to a computer monitor alters brain wave patterns without causing hallucination, etc. And this allows for the possibility of radically verifying extrasensory perception and paranormality, which is the most exciting facet for me.

I acknowledge that nature does not at all mirror the double slit experiment, but matter has intrinsic wavelength as far as I know, correct me if that isn't accurate. — Enrique

What would you mean by "matter" here?

What would you mean by "matter" here? — Metaphysician Undercover

The Danish Neils Bohr and German Max Planck, along with contributions from many additional scientists, successfully theorized matter as a duality appearing more particlelike or more wavelike depending on experimental context. Wave and particle concepts were combined in a theory of all energized mass as ‘quantized’, occurring in discrete bundles that are however spatially diffuse in ways still, in the 21st century, only probabilistically definable. Research into quantization greatly advanced scientific knowledge of the internal structure of the atom, producing the idea of atomic ‘orbitals’ as energy wells in which more or less spread out subatomic constituents such as electrons and protons flux in coordinated ways. Quantized ‘wavicles’ were found to be arranged within atoms according to specific mathematical ratios associable with chemical bonding properties, analogous to harmonics of vibrating metal wires, and to move about the environment in approximately modelable forms, but attempts to predict their behaviors exactly have so far been subject to fundamental imprecisions theorized as the ‘Heisenberg uncertainty principle’ and similar concepts. Measurability of various properties at the subatomic level - mass, velocity, energy - varies depending on the design of laboratory setups with their mutually exclusive observational focuses.

Merely speculating, but I think its important to avoid excessive bias towards a precedential model of brains as no more than a bundle of neurons wired together. The brain is actually 90% glia, which are closer to conventional, nonconducting cells in their structure, provisional of function that may differ dramatically from neuronal streamlining for purposes of electricity transmission. — Enrique

Always looking for the loopholes that might lie in what we don't know? :razz:

In fact we do know plenty about glia.

And you keep talking about electricity flows as if the brain were switch a current of electrons. But charge is carried by ions. And it is only because of the "informational" structure of the axons - the molecular machinery of ion channels - that a wave of anything can flow down a neural "wire". What "flows' is a bunch of these pores opening and closing in a chain reaction that propagates like a wave.

So there is just nothing to suggest the brain is engineered for any kind of naked electrical activity. The energy of actual free electrons would blow its delicate molecular machinery apart.

The Danish Neils Bohr and German Max Planck, along with contributions from many additional scientists, successfully theorized matter as a duality appearing more particlelike or more wavelike depending on experimental context. — Enrique

This says to me, that "matter" might appear as a particle, or it might appear as a wave, depending on one's perspective. But do you see the need to define "matter". Is "matter" to you, the temporal continuity of existence, what apokrisis called "inertia"?

Wave and particle concepts were combined in a theory of all energized mass as ‘quantized’, occurring in discrete bundles that are however spatially diffuse in ways still, in the 21st century, only probabilistically definable. — Enrique

I think there may be a problem with equating "matter" and "mass". Depending on how you might define :"matter" it might not be necessary that matter has mass. But wouldn't this make a mess of Newton's laws?

Quantized ‘wavicles’ were found to be arranged within atoms... — Enrique

No one found any "wavicles". This is theory, which you are presenting as empirical evidence.

The Nietzschean in me can't get out of the view that information is a conditional content of the mind. We mold the world to our perspective, and all of our theoretical knowledge will necessarily be information in some sense, whether quantitative or qualitative, unless we evolve biologically to perceive in a different manner, but data seems like a model of human-specific perceptual experience to my brain, not a fundamental substance or formative principle. Ancient aliens might look at it differently, the alley cat that patrols my neighborhood probably doesn't have any appreciation of abstract form as a universalizable context, and our own descendants far in the future could observe and think in ways we can't even imagine. I guess the closest I can come to agreeing at my stage of comprehension is that information represents the nature of reality as it appears to many humans, rather than is the nature of reality. But like any attempt at conceptual coherence, its a worthwhile, intuition-building thought experiment, better than most. And if everything is defined as informational, how can you be wrong? lol

The Nietzschean in me can't get out of the view that information is a conditional content of the mind. — Enrique

It's true that mental phenomena --- ideas, thoughts, feelings, etc --- are products of brain processes : Mind is the function of Brain. But I was talking about a universal phenomenon, that I call EnFormAction, which is in some respects analogous to Energy, but also to Mathematical Statistics. This unconventional concept is hard to wrap your mind around, but some physicists have come to the conclusion that everything in the world is a form of Information. The notion that Energy & Matter are composed of Universal Information, can lead to the inference that the "conditional content of the mind" is also a form of Generic Information (my term) : the power to enform, to create. This is not a religious concept, but I think it is a modern mathematical version of the Logos or Spirit that ancient myths were trying to understand metaphorically.

A Universe Built of Information : https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-03633-1_13

And if everything is defined as informational, how can you be wrong? — Enrique

Ha, you nailed it! Although the remark was meant sarcastically, it may be literally true. The operative assumption of modern Science is actually the ancient hypothesis of Atomism. That's the reductionist view of reality as composed of tiny particles. But Quantum science, while still using the metaphors of Particularism, has concluded that the foundations of reality are actually holistic Fields, from which virtual particles may or may not emerge. The links below discuss the concept in more detail than I can put in a post. My concept of Universal Information is closer to the Mathematical definition of a Field. And if it's universal it's always true. :joke:

Atomism : a theoretical approach that regards something as interpretable through analysis into distinct, separable, and independent elementary components.
___Wiki

Field Theory :
1. Physics --- theory which employs fields in the physical sense
2. Mathematics --- the algebraic concept of field
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_(mathematics)

And you keep talking about electricity flows as if the brain were switch a current of electrons. But charge is carried by ions. And it is only because of the "informational" structure of the axons - the molecular machinery of ion channels - that a wave of anything can flow down a neural "wire". What "flows' is a bunch of these pores opening and closing in a chain reaction that propagates like a wave. — apokrisis

The ion channels are nodes with sizable gaps between them. Sodium and potassium ions are a trigger, not the full mechanism of signal transduction. Molecular machinery internal to an axon of course must differ from the properties of for instance a copper wire, but some kind of transport chain including tunneling and entanglement is probably involved, similar to photosynthesis, not solely the diffusion of ions.

This says to me, that "matter" might appear as a particle, or it might appear as a wave, depending on one's perspective. But do you see the need to define "matter". Is "matter" to you, the temporal continuity of existence, what apokrisis called "inertia"? — Metaphysician Undercover

Atoms are theoretical to the core, a hypothetical image generated by arbitrary graphing systems to supplement the conceptualizing of dimensionless quantitative data, altogether assisting pattern recognition and prediction. I think the nature of matter depends completely on an observer's frame of reference. An essential disjunct exists between matter interpreted microscopically vs. macroscopically, and at the most basic levels there are multiple models associated with differing experimental contexts. As far as "inertia", it has not yet been possible to generate conditions in which matter is motionless, so I'm not sure how apropos this idea is unless referring to some kind of fundamental relativity. I would define matter as a relatively equilibrated state emergent from substance interactions.

...the fact that the brain relies on exquisite quantum balances to transduce the physics of the world into neurally encoded signals doesn’t mean the resulting conscious state is fundamentally quantum. It is instead fundamentally information processing. — apokrisis

Like I was joking about with Gnomon, I think the idea of information processing as "fundamental" is problematic if it induces some kind of excessively assumptive reification schema. In science, "information" is the content of models, not the substances themselves, and it is human beings who are doing the processing. There might exist phenomena that are not even conceivable unless we completely transcend current concepts of what information can be. The structure of computers is based on models of information processing, so in that case it is an apt term, but analogy to brains could be flawed. I'd be interested to get your definition of information in the context of biosemiosis.

Molecular machinery internal to an axon of course must differ from the properties of for instance a copper wire, but some kind of transport chain including tunneling and entanglement is probably involved, similar to photosynthesis, not solely the diffusion of ions. — Enrique

I’m unclear as to what you mean. But tunneling and entanglement don’t seem relevant even if axons were understood as copper wires with a flow of electrons.

Classical wave mechanics gives the conceptual model for how it works. The wire is like a tube stuffed with charged particles. Give it a shove at one end and the disturbance will propagate. Each electron - or ion - will be move a bit, like happens with waves in water or air, and then that collective motion itself becomes a wave of change travelling elastically at speed.

In a good conductor like copper, the electrons themselves move a short distance at a drift speed of 1% the speed of light and the resulting wave or pulse at about 90% the speed of light. This is all explained in mechanical terms rather than by invoking any quantum properties (and so any putative qualia weirdness).

In axons, you of course have an even more clearly classical mechanical story in that the charged ions are sluggish and not in such a conductive medium. And to create any kind of speedy travelling wave as a collective phenomenon requires further levels of actual molecular machinery.

The structure of the wire is critical. It is like a series of switches - or a chain of rat traps that trigger each other. Nothing quantum about the triggering or conduction. And speed is created by spacing the gaps between the sites where membrane depolarisation is happening. This is saltatory conduction. Myelin insulation spaces out the nodes and so - which may be the point you were making - the signal is carried a distance by an elastic ripple of conductive disturbance in a “tube” packed with charged ions.

So the whole story is complex. However that is because of all the extra biological engineering that constructs a classical machinery for propagating a signal. It is not about amplifying some quantum signal. It is about constructing the possibility of a mechanical signal out of materials whose quantum uncertainties have been suitably constrained.

The structure of computers is based on models of information processing, so in that case it is an apt term, but analogy to brains could be flawed. I'd be interested to get your definition of information in the context of biosemiosis. — Enrique

Yes, I agree that simple notions of information are flawed. The difference with biosemiosis is that instead of assuming that the substrate of nature is this mechanically definite stuff - stable substantial atoms of matter - the ground of being is instead a fundamental uncertainty or chaos. A quantum potential. So machinery is something that has to be built on wobbly foundations. Machinery in fact exists only if it can constrain or stabilise its own foundations.

So that is the difference. The information processing is all about imposing a classical order on an underlying unruly chaos. A computer of course is imagined as a device with no entropic connection to reality. That is why it is free to compute abstract patterns. It doesn’t even know it needs to be plugged into a socket to work.

But life and mind are computational patterns that are plugged directly into the job of stabilising the world that is their entropic power supply. All the information processing is tied to that basic purpose - maximising an entropy flow. The machinery exists to regulate material instability and create an organically structured process of growth.

That perspective is why biosemiosis can both accept the quantum basis of everything - uncertainty is the fundamental ground - but then build in the expectation that the machinery of life and mind exists as mechanism to stabilise this quantum ground.

Panpsychism on the other hand wants to treat the quantum realm as a definite substance. It sees it as a weird nonlocal fluid - a spread out coherent field with substantial properties, including qualia. And the machinery of life and mind would somehow have to be doing the job of amplifying the weak or dilute signal contained in the field effect.

So pansemiosis is about the top-down regulation or constraint of uncertainty as the paradigm. And the new biophysics gives the scientific story of how molecular machinery manages the delicate quasi classical interface where the thermal decoherence takes place.

Panpsychism is about the supposed amplification of a weak signal. And in its quantum version, it relies on early versions of quantum theory where nonlocal coherence seemed the new loophole in nature. But now thermal decoherence tells us that, in practice, everywhere that loophole is closed. The universe itself prevents any quantum instability from running out of hand.

Biosemiosis has been confirmed by science. It’s prediction that the quantum is regulated is what we find.

Quantum consciousness must predict the opposite. More and more unlikely ways must be found to explain how quantum coherent states escape their own inherent instability. Biology must somehow channel things so that thermal decoherence is held at bay. And yet, biology not only is generally bad at that on the macro scale, we have found how it is actually designed to manage it on the nano scale.

So yes, the quantum realm is harnessed in many ways. But by an “information processing” system of molecular engineering. Photosynthesis, respiratory chains, sensory receptors and everything else are proteins able to micro-manage quantum instability for purposes encoded in a system of semiosis - the regulatory habits encoded in levels of genetic, neural and (in humans) linguistic machinery.

The difference with biosemiosis is that instead of assuming that the substrate of nature is this mechanically definite stuff - stable substantial atoms of matter - the ground of being is instead a fundamental uncertainty or chaos. A quantum potential. So machinery is something that has to be built on wobbly foundations. Machinery in fact exists only if it can constrain or stabilise its own foundations. — apokrisis

The biosemiosis perspective is similar to mine because it is based on the same empirical evidence. The slight difference is that I view this underlying substrate as not unformed, homogeneous chaos, but a substance with complex patterns of supradimensional flux we have not yet even approached modeling, a theoretical enigma that probably operates according to alternate principles as richly heterogeneous as those of ecosystems.

Decoherence properties of the body's aggregate thermodynamic mass constrain this more fundamental mystery stratum of substance so that it interfaces with molecular machinery primarily at the nanoscale, but that amounts to trillions and trillions of pockets of quantum causality in a terrestrial lifeform, which make nonlocality the predominant ingredient in many facets of the organic world, a reality we have not yet deeply tapped into scientifically and technologically.

I think of the distinctly thermodynamic realm for which the planet's biology has partially adapted as highly specific to our Newtonian spatiotemporal frame of reference, exaggerated as a cultural construct in line with its crucial importance for the multibillion year hereditary persistence of our lineage in the presence of wilderness catastrophes: starvation, inclement weather, predator/prey interactions, illness, etc. But in relation to the entirety, spatiotemporality is almost like a film of algae on an ocean of nonlocality, and quantum mechanics is only beginning to gain naturalistic access via investigating some of the so-called quantum pockets, in enzyme catalysis, photosynthesis, perception and elsewhere.

Quantum biology is the initial stage of a scientific revolution as huge as the Renaissance!

In a good conductor like copper, the electrons themselves move a short distance at a drift speed of 1% the speed of light and the resulting wave or pulse at about 90% the speed of light. — apokrisis

I get the impression from a small amount I've read about semiconductors that the mechanism of "wave" propagation might amount to quantum tunneling/entanglement. Electrical wiring of course isn't pure metal but also includes constituent oxide binding agents at the tips (or something like that), and it has been suggested that conductance quantum tunnels through the oxide films.

The biosemiosis perspective is similar to mine because it is based on the same empirical evidence. The slight difference is that I view this underlying substrate as not unformed, homogeneous chaos, but a substance with complex patterns of supradimensional flux we have not yet even approached modeling — Enrique

That seems more like a huge difference. :grin:

but that amounts to trillions and trillions of pockets of quantum causality in an Earth lifeform, which make nonlocality the predominant ingredient in many facets of the organic world, a reality we have not yet deeply tapped into scientifically and technologically. — Enrique

I get the impression from a small amount I've read about semiconductors that the mechanism of "wave" propagation might amount to quantum tunneling/entanglement. — Enrique

Do you see how one contradicts the other? We have tapped into quantum tunnelling/entanglement in a big way with our technology. So it has certainly been delved into deeply.

Atoms are theoretical to the core, a hypothetical image generated by arbitrary graphing systems to supplement the conceptualizing of dimensionless quantitative data, altogether assisting pattern recognition and prediction. I think the nature of matter depends completely on an observer's frame of reference. An essential disjunct exists between matter interpreted microscopically vs. macroscopically, and at the most basic levels there are multiple models associated with differing experimental contexts. As far as "inertia", it has not yet been possible to generate conditions in which matter is motionless, so I'm not sure how apropos this idea is unless referring to some kind of fundamental relativity. I would define matter as a relatively equilibrated state emergent from substance interactions. — Enrique

I interpret then, that you are saying that whether a state is equilibrated or not is completely dependent on one's perspective, one's frame of reference. You say the nature of matter depends on one's frame of reference, and you define "matter" as a "relatively equilibrate state".

So the question is, "relative" to what? Let's say that from a specific frame of reference, a particular state appears to be an equilibrate state. How would such a judgement be made, the state would appear to be equilibrate in relation to what? We couldn't judge it in relation to the frame of reference because we couldn't assume that the frame of reference was equilibrated. By what principle could we judge that there is any such thing as matter? Or is matter simply imaginary?

So the question is, "relative" to what? Let's say that from a specific frame of reference, a particular state appears to be an equilibrate state. How would such a judgement be made, the state would appear to be equilibrate in relation to what? — Metaphysician Undercover

In this schema, matter is equilibrated or not relative to what surrounds it, and the structural context of substance as such is essentially nonlocal in some way, with Earth's aggregate "thermodynamic" mass being a special case of what we partially intuit in association with proprioception, affect, etc. as relative locality. But thermodynamic decoherence is not absolute, with all matter probably having a degree of coherence, somewhat analogous to gap junctions that connect the body's cells, so that nonlocality "flows" supradimensionally in a multitude of extremely diverse ways that transcend Newtonian physics, inducing quantumlike weirdness varying at least slightly for each instantiation of substance.

We have tapped into quantum tunnelling/entanglement in a big way with our technology. So it has certainly been delved into deeply. — apokrisis

The wave nature of electrical conductance such as takes place in a copper wire is one type of quite local nonlocality, kind of a borderline case. A pebble sitting on the ground is extraordinarily local relative to most matter. And the human body is a complex hybrid of all sorts of relative locality and nonlocality, with the distinctively "quantum" dynamics which participate in nanoscale biochemistry being exceedingly nonlocal in contrast to many organic mechanisms, though highly constrained by surrounding relative locality compared to a substance instantiation such as perhaps the Earth's atmosphere.

By what principle could we judge that there is any such thing as matter? Or is matter simply imaginary? — Metaphysician Undercover

The common sense definition of matter is probably "sense-perceptual substance", with heavy influence from the scientific materialist paradigm. As quantum phenomena and nonlocality increasingly contribute to our theoretical models of reality, the concept of matter will change.