Relationships and Causation in Living Matter: Reframing Some Methods in Life Sciences?

Abstract

In this paper I want to enrich, on the methodological and epistemological side, an earlier review of mine (in which there are more details on the physics of electrodynamic coherence), aiming to stimulate attention to some seemingly trivial or irrelevant aspects, but, in my opinion, very subtle and of crucial importance in the study of living dynamics in various disciplines (physics, biology, medicine, philosophy of science). The conceptual core is: to understand that a living system cannot be conceived, and therefore neither studied, as “an object”, “a body.” The (in essence) relational nature of the living being finds its foundations in dissipation, symmetry breakings and field theories capable to count for multiple levels of vacuum (such as Quantum Field Theory, QFT), and sees the living phase of condensed matter (on an aqueous basis) as a consequence of bosonic condensation of correlation quanta (the well-known Nambu-Goldstone bosons) over an extended and interrelated hierarchy of degrees of freedom to which a (super)coherent is associated state. In there the matter and energy components of the biological system are subjected to phase correlations to give rise to a holo-state, shared over the whole system, from which a self, endowed with continuity, emerges and thus also a biological identity rooted in a dissipative thermodynamic history. However, this “identity” is like the river of Heraclitus’ anecdote: it is a flow and not an object existing in itself, nor static; dynamics, change, are all that lasts, while water, is always different. So holds for an organism that is, in fact, an organizationally closed system, but (and precisely because) thermodynamically open. This condition implies that the study of any biological system is de facto the study of a flow of relationships, and the living system (whether a cell, a complex organism, or an ecosystem) should be conceived as a process dissipatively coupled to its environment and as a producer of responses following an autopoietic order, inherent in the very condition of coherence (as long as it exists). Once this is recognized: • We obtain the possibility of reducing (without ontological discontinuities) sophisticated emergent properties (such as sensing, perception, semantics, teleology, adaptation, memory) irreducible to the deterministic laws of the elementary components of which, nonetheless, the living matter is composed (and to the laws of which it is therefore equally subjected); • Such properties result in the emergence of “biological laws” that, in addition to physical laws, dictating action-reaction relationships, describe stimulus-response relationships (with enormously greater logical openness) valid only for the living state; • The existence of these “laws” (analogical, but now physically grounded) forces us to revisit the definition of causality in biology, understanding that the method of inquiry must be revisited on both the theory and praxis fronts (details in the text); • It is understood that the complex view is to be applied ab initio, but also advanced to a further step (on a quantum-electrodynamic basis) in which the occurrence of not-only-diachronic causality in the living matter would be uncontemplable through “classical” observables only, considered within dynamical systems theory, chaos physics and complexity science. This gives rise to constructive methodological provocations, significant for research in biology, biophysics, and medicine, and for their application within humankind and its relationships to technology and Nature, in the name of a respectful and sensitive gesture towards the web of Life.