Note from Paul, November 3, 1999

Linked to the Problem posed by Don at link:

Produce a model for aging based on a global breakdown of orchestrated synchronous processes

Dear colleagues,

cc: Gaia Foundation, New England Complex Systems Institute

On the general question of orchestrated synchronous processes.

Let me quote Hameroff and Penrose (realizing that they also are often, at times, barely grasping the problem at hand):

I take the notion of "coherent superposition" to be a type of balance between channels of expression such as might occur, at a slightly higher level of organization, in gene linkage and gene expression.

Then two paragraphs later they say:

I claim that the Orchestrated OR (Orch OR) event is a critical notion. There is a fundamental problem in current Quantum Electrodynamics (QED) that (in my (Prueitt) interpretation) REQUIRES a weak force of some type to exist in order for macro-events to occur AT ALL. This weak force is required to be active in collapsing wave-like quantum level "objects". It is not clear, from mathematical models, that random environmental interaction is of the kind of force required.

The Hameroff/Penrose work conjectures that orchestrated self-collapse is not interaction with environment, it is "self" collapse governed by constraints imposed by some specific interaction between potential-for-causing-specific-geometries (pfcsg). David Bell called the pfcsg a "beable" or "unmeasured prior state". These "beables" are neither distinct nor phase coherent, as the quantum level can not instanciate either boundary conditions nor initial conditions (personal communication from Peter Kugler).

I claim that at the scale of quantum events, this self collapse is due to "internal-to-external" expression of a "beable" that is expressed into space-time.

I suggest that perhaps the nature of a "beable" is modeled well by the situational logics (open logics) of Russian Quasi Axiomatic Theory, and by my voting procedure within a tri-level machine knowledge management architecture. The logics allows a generalization to any "cross organizational" scale. These methods involve modeling a distributed organization of stratified process as seen from the point of view of a middle level where there is the expression of substructure into an "ultrastructure".

This issue is an open one, and apparently very difficult to understand. Whitehead and others have addressed this in a way that requires a conscious awareness to move time forward, something that is too radical for me to accept face value. Self collapse might occur due to some structure in the quantum level that we have not seen yet, and orchestrated self collapse might be a function of highly organized biological systems. We shall see, as the science matures.

I will now state my own conjecture regarding the mechanism that supports awareness of self. The superposition of a finite class of different "potential space-time gravity geometries" (read "geometries" for short hand) are "born" as a flow of events relative to locations in space. This flow is from non-observable reality (of one type) into non-observable reality (of a different type). (The esoteric traditions call this a "transmigration of form" and transmigration of form is sometimes used by esoteric scholars to replace reincarnation theory.)

As a consequence of this emergence of potential specific geometry a "question" is posed. The answer can be forced by the environment only if there is no super fast process that delays the collapse (see Paul Werbos' statement at link )

and no delay mechanism (see work of K. Pribram and B. Libet) that isolates the coherence.

I feel that we may reasonably investigate whether or not the brain system has both super fast processes and delay mechanisms. If these exist, then one can link awareness to QED.

-Paul