Jonathan Reams
Vol. 18 No. 1 Sept 2023
Opening Doors to a Quantum Theory of Life, Part 1: Properties of Life at the Quantum Level
Doug Marman
Abstract: The idea that the key to life might be a quantum process is not new. Niels Bohr, Erwin Schrödinger, and Werner Heisenberg found signs of life at the quantum level. What they saw was useful, but not enough to solve the mystery of how life works.
Two recent interpretations of quantum mechanics add new pieces to the puzzle: Quantum states act the same as what biologists call “anticipation” when the future possibilities of superposition states influence the outcome. And quantum wave function collapse acts the same way as what biologists call “purposeful actions” when a choice is made.
This paper, the first in the series, “Opening Doors to a Quantum Theory of Life” (ODQTL), explores in detail the above two properties that are traditionally seen by biologists as being unique to life. In fact, many surprising traits of life are present at the quantum level. The idea that quanta might be alive is explored and shown to be a valid interpretation.
A detailed theory of life is presented in Part 2 of this ODQTL series. It is published in this same issue of Integral Review (Marman, 2023b). The new theory explains how cellular life might have emerged from quantum processes. It offers a Catalyst-First Hypothesis and shows why catalysts might be the real drivers of life, not metabolism, RNA, or accidents such as lightning striking primordial soup.
The new theory that emerges from this series of papers proposes that life is not based on the right combination of ingredients; it is a mutually responsive relationship between a life form and its habitat. We cannot take this relationship apart to study how life works because taking it apart kills the process of life. Quantum theory can explain this irreducible property as an entangled state, but new interpretations of quantum mechanics are needed to show why quantum principles must also be actively involved in relationships between organisms. This insight suggests that, when trying to understand life, context is more important than content. As a result, the science of quantum biology can expand to include interactions between organisms, opening doors that take us beyond quantum mechanics and chemistry, and perhaps even beyond biology to include psychology, as Heisenberg predicted.
Tags: superpositions, wave collapse., Doug Marman, quantum measurement problem, consciousness, mind-body problem, entanglement, panpsychism, quantum formalism
Opening Doors to a Quantum Theory of Life, Part 2: Top-Down Causation
Doug Marman
Abstract: In Part 1 of this series, “Opening Doors to a Quantum Theory of Life” (ODQTL) (Marman, 2023a), we saw that Niels Bohr, Erwin Schrödinger, and Werner Heisenberg were some of the first to raise hopes that discoveries in quantum mechanics might solve biology’s hardest problem: explaining how life works. However, they hit a wall. In fact, they hit a similar wall when they tried to make sense of quantum mechanics. We found that two recent interpreta¬tions of quantum mechanics open some new doors to both the mystery of life and to an intuitive understanding of quantum mechanics.
Surprising signs of life at the quantum level were reviewed in Part 1, as well as unexpected signs of quantum behavior in relationships between organisms. A detailed analysis showed that quantum states display the same properties as what biologists call “anticipation” when future possibilities in superposition states influence the end results. And a quantum wave function collapse displays an act when a selection is made, showing the same properties as what biologists call “purposeful action.” We then saw how, starting with four principles, it is possible to derive all of quantum formalism. This suggests a new possibility: Sentience and relationships between sentient agents may be the true foundation of quantum mechanics. This also makes sense as a founda¬tion for biology.
This paper, Part 2 of this ODQTL series, proposes a quantum theory of life that shows how cellular life could have emerged from quantum processes. A new model for life’s origin, called the Catalyst-First Hypothesis, is offered that shows why catalysts might be the real drivers of the origins of life: because catalysts engage properties of top-down causation.
The new theory described in this series of papers suggests that life is not based on the right combination of ingredients; it is a mutually responsive relationship between a life form and its living habitat. We cannot take this relationship apart to study life because taking it apart ends the relationship. Interpretations of quantum mechanics can explain this irreducible property as entanglement. And a new interpretation explains why we should see quantum principles like entanglement in relationships between organisms. And this all leads to the complexity at the heart of life that emerges from top-down causation in nested relationships.
Tags: enzymes, origin of life, leadership, reproduction, consciousness, strong emergence, death, strong force., panpsychism, Doug Marman, Birth, catalysis, embryo development
Hyper Smart Developmentally Based Stacked Neural Networks and Evidence that Allows for True Androids that Pass the Turing Test
Sofia R. S. Leite and Michael Lamport Commons
Abstract: This paper describes how a mathematically-based model of cognition and species evolution, the Model of Hierarchical Complexity (MHC) can be applied to create more effective and smarter artificial intelligence that is based upon how humans and animals solve problems. To more precisely emulate how a human acts upon the environment, a computer must learn from the environment in a way that is closer to the way that humans do. Moreover, the way humans learn from the environment is an evolutionary extension of how nonhuman animals learn. Hence, to more precisely emulate a human, nonhuman animal learning should also be taken into account. To do so, the MHC proposes an analytic, a priori measurement of the difficulty of task-actions called the Order of Hierarchical Complexity (Commons & Pekker, 2008). Task-actions mean actions directed toward problem-solving. According to the MHC, task-actions grow in complexity throughout development and evolution. The definitions for what makes an action more hierarchically complex will be presented. An application of the MHC to a general artificial intelligence architecture will be presented, and an application of it to a physics problem, called the balance beam problem, will be described. Following that, the possibility of creating truly intelligent androids based on the MHC architectural concept is discussed. An android is a computer based “organism” designed to act like an animal or human. It receives signals or input through sensors (simulating afferent nerves) and acts upon the environment through output agents (simulating muscles activated through motor nerves). The notions from the MHC that will be applied to the design of androids will also be discussed. Based on these developmental and evolutionary principles, such androids will be at least as smart as humans. They will not only pass the Turing test, as will be explained, but they will also be able to complete other tests specifically designed and appropriate for humans.
Tags: Human Learning, Stacked Architecture., Michael Lamport Commons, Model of Hierarchical Complexity, Sofia R. S. Leite, Androids, Artificial Intelligence
Using a Micro-Developmental Lens to Assess Dynamics of Scaffolding in a Facilitated Group Process
Pia Andersson
Abstract: This study provides insights into the facilitated environment as it unfolds, and serve as an exemplar of how coactive scaffolding between participants, facilitator, methods and tools can take place while and by working on a complex issue. The paper presents a case study involving representatives from different organisations gathered for the task of developing action plans to a challenging issue of public concern. The purpose of the study was two-fold. The first was to gain insights into scaffolding dynamics between a facilitator and a diverse group of stakeholders during a series of meetings. The second purpose was to track knowledge integration through moment-to-moment interactions in the scaffolded group meetings. The Integral Process for Complex Issues, a group process designed to progressively enable an increased task complexity awareness, was used to scaffold the group meetings. For the analytical purpose of tracking the moment-to-moment interaction a micro-developmental lens was adopted. This lens provided detailed clarity into how the participants, the facilitator and the methods, coactively scaffolded the generation of new and more complex knowledge through a series of transition steps. The theoretical analysis suggests that the group members built and transformed their understanding in a non-linear fashion, resulting in a higher level of integrative complexity.
Tags: Coaction, group facilitation, microdevelopment, transition processes, scaffolding, Pia Andersson
The Historical and Ideological Roots of US Voter Exclusion: An Integral Examination of the Myth of US Democracy
Walter E Davis
Abstract: This article examines voter rights, voter exclusion, and democracy in the US from historical and ideological perspectives. The contention is that voter exclusion is not the issue but a symptom of larger problems of the anti-democratic institutions of separation (dominator hierarchies), including nationalism (e.g., white supremacy and Christian nationalism), militarism, imperialism, and imperial capitalism. Voter exclusion, particularly aimed at Black and other non-white people, and their allies, and the suppression of democracy are traced through four eras: the establishment of the US 1600s-1850s), emancipation and Jim Crow (1865-1930s), protest movements (late 1940s-1990s), and Trumpism (21st Century-present). A continuity in extensive voter exclusion and anti-democratic policies and practices, and the rise the US as the dominant imperial power is demonstrated. Problems are both systemic and ontological. Thus, a multi-pronged integral approach for democratizing US society is proposed. Essential to this approach is ideological paradigm shifts in politics, economics, philosophy, science, and spirituality.
Tags: Walter E Davis, Democratic myths, equity, heterarchies, institutions of separation, paradigm shifts, voter exclusion.
Psyche’s Score: Music of the Integral Psychodynamic Sphere and Its Orbits
Willow Pearson Trimbach
Abstract: Integral Relational listening and theorizing is presented by two images, organized into two complementary formulations – an Integral Psychodynamic Sphere and Integral Psychodynamic Orbits. A defining feature of Integral Relational listening is opening an ear for the co-emergence of four primary developmental stages (psychotic, borderline, neurotic, and postconventional) and four foundational psychological positions (autistic-contiguous, paranoid-schizoid, depressive, and transcendent) that necessarily occupy any such developmental stage. This foundational intrapsychic formulation is advanced as the Integral Psychodynamic Sphere. Constant conjunctions among the four primary developmental stages and the foundational psychological positions constitute Psyche’s Score, the music of the Integral Psychodynamic Sphere. Through the example of love at the postconventional level of ego development, the interplay of all four psychological positions at this level of development is fleshed out. Then, through applying Wilber’s (2007) eight zone Integral Methodological Pluralism to this expanded view of contemporary psychoanalytic listening, these combined understandings represent and also construct a formulation of Integral Psychodynamic Orbits – the fluid image of an intrapsychically, culturally, somatically, and socially situated self-in-relation that is always in flux. A clinical example illustrates this theory at work. Through this advent of the Integral Psychodynamic Sphere and its Orbits, Integral Relational Psychotherapy thus recognizes, embraces, and engages a full range of being, including psyche’s most primitive modes and psyche’s ultimate transcendent modes of generating experience, across all levels of ego development and without excluding the postconventional levels.
Tags: integral psychology, Willow Pearson Trimbach, Integral Relational Psychotherapy, Relational Psychoanalysis, Integral Psychodynamic Sphere, Integral Psychodynamic Orbits
Produce to Protect: The Real Reason Why Change Initiatives Fail
Anne Rød
Abstract: This article challenges the concept of resistance to change and the normative approaches that continue to govern current organizational practices. It argues that the logic of, and conditioning into, rational economic theory with its quest for efficiency, performance, and results, is a main hindrance to change as it sustains an embedded immunity acting against change plans.
The research shared in the article shows that the commitment to “staying alive” in organizations outweighs the willingness to contribute to change. Instead, leaders and employees are caught in a quest to solve daily operational issues to protect both themselves and their livelihoods. The article present research findings from two team case studies and draw on Immunity to Change, a framework for addressing obstacles in change processes.
The article contributes to the discourse on change by exploring how mental models, and discernment between technical and adaptive skills, can be used to collectively increase awareness, knowledge, and mental flexibility to succeed with change.
Tags: Adaptive mindset, change, productivity, resistance., complexity, mental models, Immunity to Change, Anne Rød
Domains Theory and the Rawlsian Social Contract View of the Impermissibility of Sexual Harassment: The Case of Sexual Harassment by Harvey Weinstein
Albert Erdynast
Abstract: This study examines the sexual predator case of Harvey Weinstein utilizing Erdynast’s Domains Theory (Erdynast & Chen, 2014) and a Rawlsian social contract view to analyze the moral issues emanating from sexual harassment. Employing four task-domains and fourteen moral developmental levels (or, stages) (Erdynast, Chen, & Ikin, 2016), the paper analyzes pertinent moral issues in a case study of Harvey Weinstein. Weinstein’s claim that all sexual acts were consensual is starkly contrasted by the 80+ victims’ competing claims about his sexual harassment of them, sexual assault, sex trafficking, and rape. Evidence in Domain I – factual judgment – is evaluated to assess whether all claimants were acting as free and equal moral persons (Rawls, 1993) as are whether their rights were violated by abuser-protecting laws, statutes and policies. Domain II is the domain of worthwhile interests – in short, conceptions of the good (Rawls, 1993). Using a Rawlsian concept of original position (Rawls, 1971; Rawls, 1999), Domain III – conceptions of justice and right – places a Rawlsian constraint on the pursuit of conceptions of good when such pursuits violate the equal rights of others. Weinstein’s initial claim that “all acts were consensual” was an attempt to displace the issues into Domain II – pursuit of joint conceptions of good. This study also examines whether Harvey Weinstein’s requirements, that female employees cater to his aesthetic tastes of wardrobe and fragrances – in Domain IV, conceptions of the beautiful – violate Domain III laws and statutes. Kohlberg’s 6 stages of moral development are discussed as 14 stages that incorporate Kohlberg’s mystical Stage 7 and Rawls’ moral development of the love of humankind as supererogatory conceptions of right according to the MJI theory and scoring manual (Colby & Kohlberg, 1987a). Further, Rawls’ identification of Vices at the Level of the Morality of Association (Rawls, 1971) and Erdynast’s Relational Vices (Erdynast & Chen, 2014) are examined.
Tags: moral development, Albert Erdynast, Harvey Weinstein, Rawlsian, sexual harassment., domains
An Examination of the STAGES Scoring System
Kristian Merckoll
Abstract: This article examines two empirical studies which are referred to as validating the STAGES scoring system. The verification claims do not hold up under scrutiny, and the wrong conclusions were reached because the statistical calculations were not grounded in an adequate understanding of the relevant aspects of the scoring theory itself. This is shown by applying simple descriptive statistics that does not require any statistical background to understand. In the subsequent discussion on possible reasons for why the STAGES scoring system has too much scoring error, the conclusion is that a major root problem is that STAGES has defined itself as an extension of an existing developmental construct (EDT, Ego Developmental Theory). This notion must therefore be reconsidered. Standard calculations are provided to demonstrate effects of too much scoring error. The article further discusses the limitation in using only language as the means to assess the latest stages in the STAGES model. A distinction between the STAGES theory and the STAGES scoring system is maintained throughout, and the theory is not discussed or questioned directly. The position is taken that EDT and STAGES should continue to develop alongside each other as two related, yet different, developmental models.
Tags: Kristian Merckoll, Anecdotal evidence, constructivist developmental models, developmental altitude, empirical evidence, integral enactment, quality standards, scientific rigor, statistics, stages
A Brief Response to ‘Deepening Our Understanding of Developmental Assessments Use in Developing Leaders’ Capacity for Complexity’
Aiden M. A. Thornton
Tags: hierarchical complexity, ego development, Aiden M. A. Thornton, Lectica, complexity, leadership
Being Professional Together – Collective Quiet Resolve: Integral Ethics as Ethos-Making
Ian Wight and Ross Mitchell
Abstract: Any profession’s ethics, in practice, may be viewed as a function of a combination of personal ethics and professional ethics – implicating the person that is the professional professing, and the operative professional context, where the professionals commune as practitioners. It involves a meshing of the personal and the professional with a larger societal goal in mind – in ethics terms, a good society, privileging goodness. This is ultimately communal territory, involving a collective sense of ethics; being professional together in this respect may be represented as having a common ethos – more than the sum of all the individuals’ ethics, more of an overarching ethic that resides in the minds and hearts of the collective. This ethos is also more than the reference professional institute’s ethical code of practice or conduct; it has a more interior cast – something made by the professional practitioners, on their insides, together. It is like a professional ‘we-place’, grounding their collective professing.
This presentation explores such ethos-making, from an integral ethics perspective, with ethos as the integration of a collective ethical practice. It features the outcome of one workshop – the ethos represented as Quiet Resolve. Staged in the professional context of planning, and specifically as a component of a capstone Professional Planning Practice course – intended to help students with their own professional-self design, the workshop included a mix of planning students (professionals-in-the making) and professional planners (practitioners professing). It was designed to also assist the participant-practitioners with their own continuing professional development, so that they might potentially be more of a support for one another, especially on ethically-challenging terrain. Quiet Resolve represents a statement of their collective ethos – conceived as an integration of theoretical studies (their knowing), practice experiences (their doing), and personal values and beliefs (their being and becoming). Might this be a context for better bridging theory and practice, in relation to ethics especially – for helping professional practitioners to distill their collective ‘prof-essence’, their being professional together?
Tags: Ian Wight, Ross Mitchell, Professional ethics, Quiet resolve
Concerning the Ethics of Justice, Care, and Personal Responsibility as a Framework for Criteria Selection in Transplant Recipients
La Shun L. Carroll
Abstract: Organ transplantation centers set criteria for candidate qualification, which has led to disparate healthcare resource allocation practices affecting those with a substance use history. These individuals are denied organ transplants by committees and healthcare providers who assign them lower priority status. The lower priority argument claims that healthcare resources should not be provided equally to individuals who fail to share responsibility for not doing enough to address the diseases associated with substance use. The purpose of this paper is to explore the interrelatedness between the ethics of a merit-based system of moral responsibility and the lower priority setting involved in healthcare resource allocation pertaining to those with substance use histories. An interdisciplinary approach to the argument against the lower prioritists is taken with a focus on the relationship between different organ allocation practices affecting substance users and the justification for resource allocation practices of healthcare and transplant committees. Lower priority setting is challenged, and an argument is offered in which substance users are assigned higher priority when relying on “doing enough” in a merit-based system of moral responsibility. It is determined that one cannot substantiate assigning a lower priority status since a lack of success in rehab does not imply a lack of effort. Additionally, neither to confirmatory behavior nor to non-conforming behavior may freedom be justifiably ascribed in a merit-based system of responsibility because freedom to choose can neither be established a priori nor a posteriori concerning meritorious behavior.
Tags: Substance Use, Merit, La Shun L. Carroll, ethics, Organ Transplantation, Healthcare Resource Allocation, Lower Priority
The Concepts of Minimum and Maximum in Picasso’s Art
Albert Erdynast
Abstract: Influential Spanish artist Pablo Picasso utilized the concepts of minimum and maximum, and the contrast between these concepts within several aspects of the subjects he depicted. The painting of Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon (1907) is analyzed as a dynamic scene of four prostitutes competing for a client, along with a madam, to construct an original Cubist geometric analysis and representation of female form that transforms naturalistic depiction. Cubism geometrically analyzes and represents anatomy utilizing the triangle, curve, cone, circle, rectangle, square, cylindrical, and trapezoid forms involving simultaneous multiple planes and various perspectives. Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon is analyzed as a dynamic progression from the most naturalistic analysis and representation of female form to a Cubist content-principled conceptual representation (Erdynast & Chen, 2014). Picasso surpasses other artists by finding a minimum or a maximum beyond what other artists had achieved, e.g., an extended elbow, or a dropped arm. Using his own remarks that are rarely utilized in other analyses of his paintings, Picasso’s own agency is used to account for his objectives and to deny what he did not do. Within this paper additional works of Picasso are analyzed: The Bull Series (1945-6), Woman Ironing, (1904), Bust of a Young Woman, (1937), Weeping Woman, (1937), Massacre in Korea (1954), Final Self-Portrait Facing Death, (1972). The subjects that Picasso analyzed and represented sometimes substantially differs from the titles he gave his paintings. An analysis of the Bull Series (1945-46) by Stella Adler, a renowned acting teacher and acting coach, illustrates a formal level understanding of Picasso’s very complex art (Erdynast & Chen, 2014).
Tags: Picasso, Albert Erdynast, Bull Series, Les Demoiselles d' Avignon, Maximum, Minimum
Reflections upon Reading Elke Fein’s and Coauthors’ Book Foundations, Principles and Inspirational Resources of Integral Politics
Tags: integral, Thomas Jordan, politics, Fein