Re: Dr Mae-Wan Ho and i-sis.org " Definition in the SpaceTime of an Organism and in relation to Quantum theory?

[Ionel <***>]

Hi, Judith:

I have a brief addition, which is however neither contradictory/self-
contradictory nor controversial in the context of your posting, related to
your interesting quote from "Life Itself", also cited below after my
posting. It seems that Robert Rosen has anticipated by many  years a
current of recent efforts in Quantum Theory developments to either give up
or circumvent the continuous state function in a Hilbert space for a
quantum system, such as the recent paper published by Dr. B. J. Hiley from
the Theoretical Physics Research Unit at Birkbeck in London,
entitled: "Algebraic Quantum Mechanics, Algebraic Spinors and Hilbert
Space", (2001), 38 pp. that can be found on the web, for example, using
Google; [no doubt, Tim will be the first to find its URL and post the web
link to this paper if he's finished with his home re-construction, or
building ?--incidentally, my own web site is still "under construction" but
we may have it up and running very soon with lots of relevant stuff to the
Rosennean approach and the "new quantum biology" that is also under
development!--will let you know where and when it's ready].

The same author also quotes in this quantum-theoretical paper a  written
statement attributed to von Neumann related to this issue of (quantum)
state functions : <Yet there have been other voices raised against the
necessity of a Hilbert space;... (e.g., in quantum mechanics...  which is a
state vector space of state (complex) functions (of real x,y,z coordinates
and real time points) represented as vectors)... <Von Neumann himself wrote
to Birkhoff (1966): "I would like to make a confession which may seem
immoral: I do not believe absolutely in Hilbert space any more." (A
detailed discussion of why von Neumann made this comment can be found in
Redei (1996): "Why von Neumann did not like the Hilbert space formalism of
quantum mechanics (and what he liked instead).",in: Stud. Hist. Phil.
Modern Physics, vol. 27: 493-510(1996).>>

With best regards,

Ionel



----------------------------------------------------
On Sat, 24 Jul 2004 10:19:24 -0400, Ms. Judith Rosen

<***> wrote:

>I've been in touch with Dr. Mae-Wan Ho, whose site "i-sis.org" is, and
asked
>her if she had ever seen any of Robert Rosen's stuff. She said she had
heard
>of him but hadn't read any of his work and told me it sounded like
something
>she would like to take a look at. However, I doubt she will like what she
>sees if she does, given what she has subsequently written about quantum
>theory and living organisms. I will include a snippet from "Life, Itself",
>beginning on page 103.
>
>Robert Rosen wrote:
>"As I have indicated, several basic presuppositions of Newtonian mechanics
>break down when extrapolated from experience with bulk matter to the realm
>of the small. That is, when we come to actually think about atoms, the
>Newtonian encodings fail completely. This has had several revolutionary
>consequences in physics. One of them is the development of a  new kind of
>mechanics, quantum mechanics, which I have already [discussed]. Concomitant
>with this has been a proverbial agonizing reappraisal of causality itself,
>which is worth mentioning here. As we shall see, as far as causal
entailment
>is concerned, the quantum-theoretic revolutions were mainly technical; the
>heart of Newtonian causality (recursion) has passed intact from classical
to
>quantum mechanics...
>
>Yet when quantum mechanics seemed to contradict or preclude classical ideas
>of causality, an enormous disquiet was generated, which has still not been
>completely resolved. The problem is that the Uncertainly Principle, or more
>generally, the commutation relations on which Heisenberg based his quantum
>theory, are not compatible with the notion of phase. As we have seen, phase
>is the basic idea in the Newtonian description of particulate systems; it
is
>precisely what the recursion rules operate on to generate the trajectories
>that encode causality in that formalism. The Heisenberg commutation
>relations said that classical phase could no longer even be defined at the
>quantum level, let alone be recursive.
>
>But as was quickly realized, giving up the notion of phase did not mean
>giving up the notion of state. It merely required an encoding of that
notion
>whose relation to actual observational chronicles was now (to say the
least)
>indirect. Formally, in quantum mechanics, the wave functions that encode
>state remain completely recursive, governed now be Schrödinger's equation
>(or its equivalents) rather than by Newton's Second Law. The guts of
>classical causality therefore passed intact to the new mechanics. It so
>happened that the new encoding, into a formalism of wave functions and
>Schrödinger's equation, could be related only in a statistical way to the
>old, classical encoding, so that the two inferential structures in the
>formalisms could not be brought into a complete homology. But as we have
>seen, this is an entirely different matter; causality encodes differently
>into the two kinds of formalisms, but that only says something about the
>encodings, and not about causal entailment itself...
>
>Nevertheless, the reappraisal of causality occasioned by the advent of
>quantum theory has left physicists without consensus on what causality is
or
>on how it should be encoded into contemporary physical formalisms. More
>generally, no one is today sure what the formalism of quantum theory
>encodes, or even if it encodes anything at all; in this latter view,
>advocated by Bohr under the rubric of complementarity, the only thing that
>matters is the decoding. I believe it fair to say that the "foundations" of
>quantum theory remain a quagmire, to a far greater extent than has ever
been
>true in physics before.
>
>It would therefore be idle, as well as perhaps presumptuous, to enter into
a
>more detailed discussion of quantum theory here. My main point is, however,
>unarguagble: that the concept of state plays the central role in its
>formalism, just as it did in its classical predecessor, and the essential
>property of state is its recursiveness. It thus perpetuates the duality
>between states and dynamical laws that began with Newton. The inferential
or
>entailment structures in the two formalisms are different enough so that
>they cannot be directly compared (and indeed, attempts to directly compare
>the two formalisms have created much of the confusion to which I alluded
>above), but they remain different species of the same genus."
>
>My diagnosis of what Dr Ho has been trying to achieve is a scientific
>description of what causes life in living systems from within the accepted
>paradigm. She does not appear to question the soundness of the foundational
>issues involved, only the design of the structures built on these
>foundations. She recognizes the mechanistic approach as being inapplicable,
>but she is still trying to build structures on the same flawed foundations.
>If she reads my father's work and sees what he saw, she will have to pull a
>"Rashevsky" and go in a completely different direction (basically
disavowing
>all earlier work). That's a really painful thing to make one's self do and
>is one reason why my father had so much respect for Rashevsky's courage as
>well as his intelligence. It's also why he felt such protectiveness towards
>Rashevsky when people like Lewontin tried to make a noose out of the older
>work and hang Rashevsky's credibility with it.
>
>I'd be interested in hearing thoughts to the contrary if the group has
some?
>
>Judith