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Living state for self-organization a plea
pp. 109-132
Abstract
Perhaps the most outstanding example of self-organization is the living organism. While it is moving or not-moving, sensing, responding, growing, developing, ageing the processes resulting in the maintenance of the organized state are always at work. There is throughflow of mass and momentum. Time also "flows". Yet the identity of the organism is never in doubt. There go on the intrinisic programmed patterns of interaction and overall behaviour. Not only a body but what is most surprising is that the properties and strategies of self-organization are passed on even to a successor organism. Yet we know little of the fundamental rules that will create and sustain functional dynamism. In many cases of sudden death of the organism the structures may remain intact, the functionalism vanishes. The problem is so complex that it may seem beyond experiments and theories. The organism is indeed a physical body whether a virus, or a slime mold or man. We should thus expect the laws of physics to apply. In every system that is isolated out from it they do, to an approximation, yet there is no theory for a global systemic organization. Is this to tease or teach the physicist? Do we need new physics? A living body is made of molecules, but no molecules, indeed not all the molecules of the same body put together, would create a functioning organism. Chemistry of molecules is therefore no final answer. If all the organs are put together the body will not come alive. A body must necessarily self-organize. 50 years back the demand was for dealing with non-linear systems. Demand was made for new mathematics. Then it was realised that there was indeed the landmark work of Henri Poincaré. Following him then we had the puzzles of entropy, thermodynamics for near-equilibrium, far-from-equilibrium, dissipa-tive structures, fluctuating systems, chaos, catastrophe, elasticity, synergetics, new geometries, computers, new reiteration-generated geometries. Words which should have been there from the beginnings of languages, like self-organization, self-similarity, self-reference, autopoiesis, autocriny, infrequently heard before, now hold the central stage of discussions, yet something is missing. We know what objects can do when pushed, what they would do cooperatively, what they would do when moved unequally, what individuals would do as numbers in population dynamics or in computer iterations of some particular functions, but to our dismay many such doings cannot come to pass in the living systems. At least not in a shape so as to serve as the basis of self-organization inspite of all the plenum. Every single system, if small enough and in durations small enough, may succeed in manifesting this or that result of these formulations, but in the end we recognise that they succeed only for some components of the system, some triggers for small acts; nothing will create the evolving, reacting ensemble of functions that the living body is. Study shows that it is not the lack of major rules discovered but rather the state of structures on which to apply them. The problem is so central and so vital and so widely applicable that one must attend to it, maybe merely for a concept, and even at the risk of being correctable. It has been proposed that the missing something is the anatomy of energy flows in the entire body, with pumps, in a system of "loose structure", loose enough to be relevant for bounds of energy, thermodynamically open and operationally in non-equilibrium, — so to say the Living State [4, 7, 14, 15, 46]. It can be shown that all necessary properties using formulations of self-organization [55]–[58] are derivable from this essential structuration, effectively a pumped boson body.
Publication details
Published in:
Mishra Kumar Ramesh, Maaß D, Zwierlein Eduard (1994) On self-organization: an interdisciplinary search for a unifying principle. Dordrecht, Springer.
Pages: 109-132
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-45726-5_8
Full citation:
Mishra Kumar Ramesh (1994) „Living state for self-organization a plea“, In: R. Mishra Kumar, D. Maaß & E. Zwierlein (eds.), On self-organization, Dordrecht, Springer, 109–132.