Quantum Resonance 3 - Causality and Complex Adaptive Systems

In my previous post I discussed why humans are driven to identify causalities. It is a learning pattern for better survival. But that human drive should not make us prone to misjudge the concepts of causality in physics. Causality is at best a rough guess that is probably approximately correct. In complex adaptive systems, causality in its classical physics form has little relevance and the same is true for quantum physics. Also causality is shaped by the means of how it is being searched for.

Looking for a certain patterns already requires a hypothesis and it is the form of the hypothesis that shapes the answer. The search pattern of what you type into Google very much defines of what you can find. The biggest problem with Google and any search is relevance. Most of what we find on Google is utterly irrelevant to our intent. 99.9999% of it. That same is true for all of science. The patterns of your search will define what you find. The language of your mathematics shapes all the answers that you can get. Most of what you get is utterly irrelevant … 99.9999% of it.

The inability to identify the principles behind the gradual development of species over time has led Darwin to assume that it is random changes to our genes that then are weeded out by survival of the fittest. That is most likely wrong, as much as he was right about the true controversy at the time that humans and primates have a common genetic past. Random genetic evolution is in the light of current understanding ever more unlikely. The DNA itself does not cause a certain body to be developed. It is a passive archive, containing protein coding which have to arise by self-organization into a lifeform. Genetic variation does not provide phenotypic variation on which selection may then act. Such chance changes are actually repaired by a correction mechanism in replication to avoid catastrophic gene transcription errors. A mutation that actually causes a phenotypic effect has to occur as a concerted change in many areas of the DNA code. Gene expression is controlled by a higher process that switches genes on and off. Exactly how is not yet understood. There is however a large amount of ‘junk DNA’ that could or seems to have those regulatory effects at a higher level or levels. There is a genetic memory that causes our inborn instincts as neural patterns in our brain. Regulatory gene networks would promote phenotypic changes by reacting to the environment that gene expression fine-tunes as needed also in response to the environment.

It is thus utterly unlikely that  emergence or evolution is random or by chance. This is why religious believers can say from their gut that our existence is not a random senseless event. They are right, but they obviously found answers that were shaped by their questions. Neither emergence nor its consequence evolution is however predictable or reductionable. Even where a reduction to parts or steps is possible it does not answer the question ‘why’ because there is no such answer. Things happen because the environment supports it. There is no cause in the sense that drives happenstance forward, but it needs the inert opportunity or potential and a receptive supportive environment. The potential has to exist in our genes but the environment enables and receives it.

The balance of opportunity potential and receptive environment is a resonance and works an all levels. What science calls either a light wave, a photon particle or a probabilistic quantum wave packet is an opportunity potential in the complex wave that represents what we call an atom. The electron wave of that atom cannot have a causal reason or simply spontaneously shed that photon potential into empty space where it will be suspended in nothing or ripple through quantum field oscillators until it falls off the edge of the universe, or magically returns into it as it folds back onto itself or creates new quantum oscillators that expand the universe forever. That widely spread out opportunity potential (probability wave function) will however collapse as a whole AT ONCE across the universe as soon as we interact with it in any way. That picture makes no sense at all and is in stark contradiction to Einstein. The information and energy content of that wave is eradicated from the universe at higher than the speed of light. Therefore Einstein had to see the photon (and actually also the electron) as a point particle and that means that the photon does not physically exist. It is a mathematical vehicle only. It must be the interaction ONLY that is of relevance. Many models use already ‘virtual photons’ for energy transfers because they do not follow Einstein’s relativistic principles. The Standard Model uses different types of bosons to model those energy/information transfers.

The same concept must be true for all of the universe/nature. Opportunity potential and a receptive environment are the same for photons, DNA replication, and bringing up children or a free market economy. Sender and receiver shape and form the energy of information exchange by resonance. The time arrow of causality or the causal cone of a photon is just that opportunity potential as is the collapsible wave function. Einstein realized that light must be quantized as otherwise there could be no equilibrium in black body energy radiation. We can take that thought a step further. The equilibrium of a black body (thus any physical entity) is caused by the quantization effect of harmonic resonances. Poincaré proved that in a dynamic planetary system only orbits with certain harmonics are stable.

Energy/information is only transferred when two entities share by chance the potential/receptor space AND they exhibit a resonance. The first is a probability function and the other is a harmonic principle. You can try that next time you go into a music store. Find two large contrabass close to each other. Strike one of their strings hard and then check the same string on the other and you will find it vibrating. No other strings will vibrate (actually some harmonic tones will). Me striking the string creates the potential, while the air and the other string being closely enough tuned represent the receptive environment. I am unable to tell you if there is a string that will vibrate, but if it does – I know immediately that it is at the same frequency as mine and that it does not vibrate by chance. I suddenly have an emergent orchestra of vibrating strings.

Causality has from a philosophical viewpoint two integrated elements: The causal potential and the complex harmonic receptor effects. Together they form a complex adaptive system of resonant layers between which new phenomenons emerge where resonances support information/energy exchange. Those layers of emergent properties are on the lowest layers seperated by boundaries of symmetry-breaking phase transitions. More on those in my next posts.