Infinite Potential by Lothar Schafer

Author:Lothar Schafer [Schafer, Lothar]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-98596-5
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2013-04-02T04:00:00+00:00

NOT FROM NOTHING, NOT BY ERROR, NOT IN BLINDNESS: BUT BY THE COSMIC POTENTIALITY

In his paper “Three Levels of Emergent Phenomena,” biologist Terrence Deacon writes about the evolution of life: “Creating something from nothing is an important part of what the universe is about, and some of the most intriguing examples of this curious process are what define us as living thinking beings.”

Often when we think about the nature of this world, we come up with ideas that are so fascinating that they take our mind in their grip. The idea that the complex forms of life come out of nothing is such an idea.

If you think about it, the Darwinian system of thought makes sense. Species obviously change. Their changes seem random, meaning that they aren’t driven by the purposes of a designer. Moreover, in the variation of species, the visible order emerges out of nothing that we can see! Accordingly, it makes sense that biologists describe the process of copying genes as “blind,” and mutations as “errors.”

Here, again, when we step down to the molecular level, the anthropomorphic descriptions of things come to a sudden halt.

Nobody can deny that we are chemical reactors. At every moment your life is based on the chemical properties of the molecules in your cells. So if you claim that living chemical reactors will evolve new structures out of nothing, you must find the molecular basis for this process. That is, you must find a mechanism by which molecules create new forms out of nothing.

But there is no such mechanism, because molecules are quantum systems. As we saw in chapter 2, all that a molecule can do is jump from an occupied state to an empty state. It can’t jump into nothing. The restructuring of a DNA molecule, for example, can be understood as the actualization of one of its virtual states. It is true that, when several atoms or molecules interact, new states will emerge in the interaction that don’t exist in the isolated atoms or molecules. But these new states, too, don’t come out of nothing; they emerge in a predictable way out of the interacting potentialities of the individual atoms or molecules. A hydrogen molecule, for example, isn’t created out of nothing, but it is the actualization of a virtual state that belongs to the potentialities of interacting hydrogen atoms. The same principle applies to the emergence of all new structures in living organisms.

We can bring these considerations to a short form: Chemical systems can form new structures not out of nothing but out of the interacting potentialities of their components.

From the times of the Celts to the Middle Ages, the inhabitants of northern Spain believed that the westernmost point of Europe, a cape in the Atlantic Ocean, was the end of the world. So they called it Cape of the End of the World, or Cabo Fisterra in the Galician language. It was general knowledge that, if you sailed west off that cape, after some time you would abruptly fall off the edge of the earth and into nothing.

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