Tao Articles

Mae-Wan Ho is the author of The Rainbow and The Worm: The Physics of Organisms.
Her ideas on the universe as an intelligent, coherent quantum organism match closely the ideas of ancient Taoists. She once again offers an energetic explanation in the language of modern physics on what is clearly described in Taoist alchemy texts. This paper links ecology and the energy field as being inseparably linked.
Michael Winn

1. Introduction

The Ufaina Indians in the Colombian Amazon believe in a vital force called fufaka which is present in all living things. The source of this vital force is the sun. From the sun, it reaches earth and is constantly recycled among plants, animals and human beings. Each group of beings requires a minimum of the vital force in order to live, and is seen to be borrowing the energy from the total energy stock. When any being dies, the energy is released and goes back to the stock. Similarly, when a living being consumes another, for example, when a deer eats the leaves of the tree, or a tree extracts nutrients from the soil, or when people cut down trees to make a clearing, the consumer acquires the energy of the consumed. What is of importance to the Ufaina is that the vital force continues to be recycled from one species to another in such a way that not too much accumulates in any one of them, since this could deprive another of its vital force, and upset the natural balance (von Hildebrand, 1988).
It is a remarkably coherent cosmology: a natural ecological wisdom that understands nature as a dynamically balanced whole linked by energy flow, with the energy arising ultimately from the sun. This cosmology is based on a total understanding that comes not just by scientific observations, but from an intimate experience of nature from within. It took Western science hundreds of years with many sophisticated instruments and a number of false starts and turns in order to arrive at a similar picture. As Peter Bunyard (1989) says, ‘The Indian conception … is not in principle far removed from… [our own] notion of energy flows and foodweb and chains, with the sun providing the necessary energy.’ The major difference between them and us is that whereas they live by their wisdom and see themselves as part of nature, we have placed ourselves above and outside the balance of nature, to the peril of all.
What we want to do in this paper is to present a vision of ecological balance from contemporary Western biophysics which shows just how intimately we are connected with one another and with nature. How all nature is one resonating and intercommunicating whole. We shall be drawing from the work of many, including ourselves, who have derived inspiration from the union of biology and physics.
Let us begin with the western ecological versionof energy flow. The energy of sunlight is absorbed in individual packets or quanta called photons by chlorophyll, the colour pigment in green plants. This energy in each quantum goes into an excited electron, which, in the course of falling back to the ground state, travels around the body, its energy meted out to support all vital activities such as growth and differentiation, sensations, and movements. When animals feed on plants or on other animals, they are taking in the energy stored in the food to serve their own growth and development and all the activities that constitute being alive. Hence, the energy absorbed from the sun is circulated a long way round all the organisms in the biosphere, with fractions of the total being lost as heat on the way till finally it becomes spent, or reaches the ground state. The energy cycle is accompanied by the parallel cycling of chemicals. Both cycles branch and anastomose in a very complicated way as ecologists who study foodwebs or nitrogen and carbon cycles are well-aware. But it leaves us in no doubt that all life is a dynamic unity, it is the consequence of sunlight streaming through an open system, to maintain it far away from thermodynamic equilibrium.

Albert Szent-Gyorgi (1960), a founding father of modern biochemistry, had a nice way of putting it: that life is an interposition between two energy levels of an electron: the ground state and the excited state, and furthermore, as it is the electron that goes round the circuit, life is really a little electric current going round and connecting up all nature with the sun and the earth. This fundamental unity of physics and biology has indeed inspired a lot of people who felt that here was the key to unlocking the mystery of the living state. But as Szent-Gyorgi remarked then, and it is still largely the case now, biochemistry and molecular biology do not address such questions. They tell us a great deal about what the molecules that make up living organisms are, but very little about how they are supposed to act. How the energy plucked originally from the sun is translated so very efficiently into various forms of work – chemical, mechanical, electrical and osmotic – and in organizing matter into the splendid diversity of organisms in the biosphere. Szent-Gyorgi suggested that we can only begin to understand these characteristics of living systems if we take into account the collective properties of the molecular aggregates in terms of solid state physics. There, we would find a clue to the mystery of life.
We know, for example, that although at ordinary temperatures, the molecules in most physical matter have a high degree of uncoordinated, or random motion. The situation can change when the temperature is lowered to beyond a critical level. At that point, all the molecules so to speak, condense into a collective state, and exhibit the unusual properties of superfluidity and superconductivity. In other words, all the molecules of the system move as one, and conduct electricity with zero resistance (by a coordinated arrangement of all the electrons). Liquid helium at a temperature close to absolute zero is the first and only superfluid substance known. And various pure metals and alloys superconduct at liquid helium temperatures. Recently, technology has progressed to materials which can superconduct at much higher temperatures above absolute zero. The solid-state physicist Herbert Frohlich (1968) in Liverpool was among the first to point out that something like a condensation into a collective mode of activity may be occurring in living systems, such that living organisms are in effect, superconductors working at physiological temperatures. He suggested that much of the metabolic energy, instead of being lost as heat, is actually stored in the form of coherent electromechanical vibrations in the body. He called these collective modes, coherent excitations.

Coherence refers to highly correlated activities in both space and time. In physics, it is usually understood as the ability of electromagnetic waves to interfere. For instance, in a version of Young’s pioneering experiment (Fig. 1), two narrow slits and are illuminated by light from a light source. The light beams, on passing through the slits, fall on the screen and form an interference pattern of differing brightness in accordance to where the oscillations in the two light beams are in phase or out of phase. The ability to form interference patterns depends on the stability of the oscillations in the two light beams, or more specifically their phase relationships. This phase stability is referred to as coherence; the more coherent the light, the sharper the interference pattern. The coherent state is fluctuationless and has the further characteristic that it is factorizable (Glauber, 1969). This means that the parts paradoxically behave statistically independently of one another while maintaining a coherent pattern as a whole. In other words, coherence does not imply uniformity, or that every individual part or molecule of the system is necessarily doing the same thing all the time. An intuitive way to think about it is in terms of a grand symphony, or a grand ballet; or better yet, a jazz band in which individuals are doing different things and are yet in tune or in step with the whole. It is a state of cooperativity in which the individuals cooperate simply by doing their own thing and expressing themselves.
What are the consequences of coherence? It results in properties that are characteristic of biological systems. These include the high efficiency of energy transfer and transformation which often approaches 100%; the ability of communication at all levels within cells, between cells and between organisms capable of resonating to the same frequencies; the possibility for sensitive, multiple recognition systems utilizing coherent electromagnetic signals of different specific frequencies, such as for example, the organization of metabolic activities within the cell, the operation of the immune network and a host of other biological functions involving specific recognition between hormones or ligands and their receptors; and finally, the stable persistence of the working system arising from the inherent stability of coherent states. A more detailed description of coherence is given in Ho (1993a).

2. Biophotons and coherence in living systems

Evidence for the existence of coherent excitations in biological systems came from the study of biophotons (see Popp et al, 1981; Popp, 1986). Practically all organisms emit light at a steady rate from a few photons per cell per day to several photons per organism per second. An increasing number of observations within the past 15 years from different laboratories all over the world suggest that biophotons are emitted from a coherent photon field within the living systems. Organisms are thus emitters and most probably, also receivers of coherent electromagnetic signals which may be essential for their functioning (see next Section).
The nature of the light emitted from living organisms is best studied after a brief exposure to weak illumination. It has been found, without exception that the the re-emitted light from living tissues follows, not an exponential decay curve as characteristic of non-coherent light, but a hyperbolic decay function which is exhibited only by coherent light (see Fig. 1). This unusual behaviour can be intuitively understood as follows. In a system consisting of non-interacting molecules emitting at random, the energy of the emitted photons are lost completely to the outside or converted into heat, which is the ultimate non-coherent energy. If the molecules are emitting coherently, however, the energy of the emitted photons are not completely lost to the outside. Instead, part of it is coherently reabsorbed by the system. The consequence is that the decay is very much delayed, and follows characteristically a hyperbolic curve with a long tail. This result can be derived rigorously from both classical and quantum mechanical considerations (Popp, 1986). A coherent system stabilizes its frequencies during decay whereas a noncoherent system always suffers a shift in frequencies. That, and the capability to reabsorb emitted energy account for the stability of coherent states.

3. The characteristics of biophotons

Where do biophotons really come from? We know that all sorts of excited molecules can emit light when they relax back to the ground state, the frequency of the emitted light being specific for each kind of molecules. When the spectrum of biophotons is examined, however, it was found that the light is always in a broad band of frequencies from the infra-red to the ultraviolet, with approximately equal numbers of photons distributed throughout the range. This is very different from the Boltzmann distribution which characterizes a system at thermodynamic equilibrium at the physiological temperature of the biological system, thus indicating that the latter is far, far away from thermodynamic equilibrium (see Fig. 2). Not only is there an excess of photons at the high energy (short wave-length) end of the spectrum, but the distribution is very nearly flat. In other words, it does not depend on the wavelength: f(l) = const. This means that the light is emitted from all kinds of molecules all over the cell. The photons are stored in a delocalized manner within the system, and all the frequencies are coupled together to give, in effect, a single degree of freedom.
Evidence for the delocalization of coupled photons come from the observation that the emitted light retains its broad spectral distribution when organisms are stimulated with monochromatic light or light of limited spectral compostion. Moreover, the hyperbolic decay kinetics has the same form over the entire spectrum of emitted light (see Popp, 1986; Musumeci et al, 1992).
The Boltzmann distribution characteristic of a system at thermodynamic equilibrium arises from the maximization of entropy (molecular disorder, or degrees of freedom) under the constraint of a fixed energy in a closed system. As biological systems are open instead of closed, the constraint of a fixed energy does not apply. This does not mean that energy conservation is violated, as biological system + surroundings are still subject to energy conservation. Nor does it mean that there is always an overflow of energy within the system. It only means that there is always enough energy available for the system. Living systems store
energy (or photons) over the whole range of space and time scales – from 10-10m to metres or more, and 10-9s to days or longer time intervals – in a readily mobilizable form. They do not suffer from energy shortage on account of their high storage capacity within the intricate space-time organization (see Ho, 1993a,b for details).
The f(l) = const. distribution can also be seen as the consequence of the maximization of entropy when the constraint of fixed energy is removed in an open system far from equilibrium. The f(l)= const. profile looks somewhat like the expression of “white noise” within the system, but this is far from the case. As this distribution represents the highest possible entropy in a system far from equilibrium, fluctuations cannot be interpreted in terms of noise – in contrast to a system at thermal equilibrium. Rather, they are “signals” generated within the system. In other words, by maximizing entropy according to f(l) = const., the signal/noise ratio of the biological system is optimized over all wavelengths (Popp, 1989). On the other hand, as the frequencies are all coupled together, the absolute value of entropy representing the maximum can also become arbitrarily small, theoretically even zero.
In summary, the fact that there is always enough energy available in the biological system confers on it the following properties:

1. Optimal signal/noise ratio for communication,
2. Existence at a phase threshold between a chaotic (S – , N – ) and a coherent (S – 0, N – 1) regime, where S is the entropy, and N is the number of degrees of freedom, and
3. The possibility to extend energy storage, or the f(l) = const. distribution to longer and longer wavelengths in the course of evolution, and hence to expand the range of communication from distances between molecular within the cell all the way to distances between individuals in a population.

4. Long range communication

The hypothesis that the f(l) = const. distribution of biophotons can extend into infinitely long wavelengths is admittedly an extrapolation from measurements within and near the visible range. However, it can explain a variety of phenomena such as cancer development or group formation in organisms.
We are postulating the existence of very weak, long-range (long wave-length) interactions between living systems. These weak long-range emissions cannot be detected directly with the instrumentation now available. However, this is not a sufficient reason for excluding them from consideration, as there are methods of obtaining indirect evidence of their existence, as we shall describe below.

a. Normal and cancer cells in culture
A first experiment of this kind was performed by Schamhart and van Wijk (1987). They exposed suspensions of cultivated rat liver and rat hepatoma cell lines H35 and HTC for some seconds to white-light from a 150W tungsten lamp and registered the re-emitted light afterwards. The decay curves are, as usual, hyperbolic rather than exponential. On altering the number of cells in the suspension, the found that normal cells exhibit decreasing light re-emission with increasing cell density, whereas tumour cells show a highly nonlinear increase with increasing cell density (see Fig. 3). If there were no long-range interactions between the cells, the intensity of re-emitted photons would increase linearly with increasing number of cells, corrected by a term for self-absorption within the population. Neither the nonlinear increase of re-emission intensity from tumour cells nor the significant decrease of re-emission from normal cells could be explained unless there are long-range interactions between the cells, which are furthermore, correlated with their differing social behaviour, the tendency of tumour cells to disaggregation as opposed to the tendency of normal cells to aggregate.These phenomena can be interpreted in terms of Dicke’s (1954) theory of photon-emission from an ensemble of emitters. He showed that photon emission tends to bifurcate into the two branches of superradiance and subradiance as soon as the wavelength of the emitted light is large compared to the distances between the emitters which are also absorbers. Superradiance is the increase of emission intensity concomittant with a shortening of the relaxation time. The opposite branch describes the regime of subradiance where emission intensity decreases with a more and more prolonged decay time, corresponding to photon storage within the system.
In terms of Dicke’s theory, normal cells have a greater capacity for subradiance the closer they are together, while the malignancy of tumour cells is associated with the opposite behaviour, that is, the loss of subradiance. This suggests that long-range interaction is based on the coherence of the subradiance regime, with the coherence volume extending over the entire cell population. By changing the degree of coherence the cells can control and regulate their social activities. According to this model, tumour cells, unlike normal cells, seem unable to communicate. This may account for the repulsive forces that are responsible for metastasis in the malignant cells as opposed to the attractive forces responsible for population formation in normal hepatocytes (for further details see Nagl and Popp, 1987).

b. Populations of Daphnia
Even more clear-cut results are obtained in organisms, such as Daphnia; where self-emission is measured instead of stimulated re-emission. Figure 4 depicts the results of measurements made by Galle et al (1991). Instead of the expected linear increase in photon intensity with increasing number of individuals, a pattern of maxima and minima is observed, where the maximum and minimum values of photon intensity can be reproducibly assigned to definite numbers of individuals in the cuvette. It turns out that they invariably correspond to integer ratios of the average distances between individual animals to their body size. The results cannot be interpreted in terms of ordinary biochemistry. Instead, by treating the daphnia as a population of antennae interacting by means of resonance wavelengths related to their geometrical dimensions, a good fit to the experimental data is obtained. Regardless of whether the details of the hypothesis are correct, the experiments clearly demonstrate the existence of long-range interactions between individuals in a population. These interactions may be the basis for swarming and the regulation of growth and other collective functions. The link to body size indicates communication wavelengths in the microwave to millimeter range.

c. Superdelayed luminescence in Drosophila
We have recently discovered the remarkable phenomenon of superdelayed luminescence in synchronously developing populations of early Drosophila embryos, in which intense, often prolonged and multiple flashes of light are re-emitted with delay times of one minute to eight hours after a single brief light exposure. Some examples are presented in Figure 5 (see Ho et al, 1992). The phenomenon depends on the existence of synchrony in the population, and furthermore, the timing of light exposure must fall within the first 40 minutes of development. However, the occurrence of the flashes themselves do not obviously correlate with specific embryonic events. They give information concerning the physical state of the embryos at the time of light stimulation – such as the existnece of a high degree of coherence – rather than at the time during which the flashes themselves occur. Superdelayed luminescence bears some formal resemblance to the phenomenon of superradiance described above in which cooperative interactions among embryos within the entire population lead to most, if not all the embryos emitting light simultaneously. This implies that each embryo has a certain probability of re-emitting after light stimulation, so that it can either trigger re-emission in other individuals, or alternatively, its re-emission could be suppressed by them. Only whe the population is re-emitting at the same time is the intensity sufficient to be registered as the intense flashes that is detected by the photon-counting device. On the other hand, re-emission in the entire population could also be suppressed (i.e., in the subradiant mode), such that in approximately 30 to 40% of the cases, there is no clear indication of any superdelayed re-emission.
We do not know if any functional significance could be attached to superdelayed luminescence. Drosophila females typically lay eggs just before sunrise, so the external light source could be used as an initial synchronizaing signal or Zeitgeber, which maintains the circadian and other biological rhythms. The superdelayed re-emission could then be a means of maintaining communication and synchrony among individuals in the population. On the other hand, the flashes may simply be the embryos’ way to inform us of their globally coherent state at the time when light stimulation is applied, enabling the embryos to interact nonlinearly to generate light emission that is coherent over the entire population, and orders of magnitude more intense than the spontaneous emission background (see Ho et al, 1992; and Ho, 1993a for further details).

5. Coherence and the evolution of consciousness

What does the study of coherence contribute to our understanding of the unity of life? To return to our overview on the cycle of life, we can see that sunlight is the most fundamental source of energy, which is supplied at the high frequency end, and biological systems as a whole display the natural tendency to delay the decay of this high level energy for as long as possible. This is why the earth’s natural biosphere is not a monoculture, indeed, it is the very diversity of life that is responsible for delaying the dissipation of the sun’s energy for as long as possible by feeding it into ever longer chains and webs and multiple parallel cycles in the course of evolution. But that is not the entire story, for the the most effective way of hanging on to this energy for as long as possible is by the formation of a coherent platform of oscillations which expands the photon field into a coherent state of growing bandwidth. This is the f(l) = const. distribution which allows the sun’s energy to spill over into longer and longer wavelengths. This may be why organisms have such different life-spans; the trend in evolution is towards the emergence of organisms with longer and longer life-spans and finally in the case of social organisms and human beings, we see the emergence of social traditions that span many generations. The link with social tradition is the clue to the meaning of this energy flow through a coherent field of ever increasing bandwidth. For it is at the same time a flow and a creation of information. Electromagnetic signals of different frequencies are involved in communication within and between organisms, and between organisms and the environment. The coherent platform is a prerequisite for universal communication.
Thus, it seems that the essence of the living state is to build up and extend the coherent spatio-temporal platform for communication starting from the energy of the sun initially absorbed by green plants. Living systems are thus neither the subjects alone, nor objects isolated, but both subjects and objects in a mutually communicating universe of meaning. In contrast to the neo-Darwinist point of view, their capacity for evolution depends, not on rivalry or on might in the struggle for existence. Rather, it depends on their capacity for communication. So in a sense, it is not individuals as such which are developing but living systems interlinked into a coherent whole. Just as the cells in an organism take on different tasks for the whole, different populations enfold information not only for themselves, but for all other organisms, expanding the consciousness of the whole, while at the same time becoming more and more aware of this collective consciousness. Human consciousness may have its most significant role in the development and creative expression of the collective consciousness of nature.

References

Ho, M.W. (1993a). The Rainbow and The Worm: The Physics of Organisms, World Scientific, Singapore.
Ho, M.W. (1993b). Bioenergetics, Open University Press, Milton Keynes (in preparation).
opp, F.A. (1984). Biologie des Lichts, Paul Parey Verlag, Berlin.
Popp, F.A. (1986). On the coherence of ultraweak photonemission from living systems. In Disequilibrium and Self-Organization (C.W. Kilmister, ed.). pp. 207-230, D. Reidel Publishing Co., Dordrecht.
Popp, F.A. (1989). Coherent photon storage of biological systems. In Electromagnetic Bio-Information (F.A. Popp, U. Warnke, H.L. Konig, and W. Peschka, eds.), Urban & Schwarzenberg, Munchen.
Popp, F.A., Ruth, B., Bahr, W., Bohm, J. Grass, P., Grolig, G., Rattemeyer, M., Schmidt, H.G., and Wulle, P. (1981). Emission of visible and ultraviolet radiation by active biological systems. Collective Phenomena 3, 187-214.
Popp, F.A., Li, K.H., Mei, W.P., Galle, M. and Neurohr, R. (1988). Physical aspects of biophotons. Experientia 44, 576-585.
Szent-Gy?rgi, A. (1960). Introduction to a Submolecular Biology, Academic Press, New York.

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This is a seminal piece that reveals shocking news to most Americans: that Traditional Chinese Medicine is NOT traditional, but a Maoist creation of the 1950’s. TCM is today distinguished from Classical Chinese Medicine, which would include the type of chi kung and alchemical healing taught by the Healing Tao community. TCM was carefully disemboweled of anything Taoist and spiritual, in order to put a modern scientific face on old China. This is a 1984 George Orwell scenario in which history books are suddenly re-written by the government. Most acupuncture schools don’t want this information disseminated, as it undercuts their raison d’etre. This is not to say that TCM has no value; it has simply lost its highest level of spiritual healing theory and practice. Not to worry, they are all still alive and well in the Healing Tao.
Michael Winn

This article is based on the conviction that the traditional art of Oriental medicine is dying–both in mainland China, home to the mother trunk of the field, and consequently overseas where branches of the tree are trying to grow. It may be an anachronistic piece, written at a time when TCM administrators around the world are celebrating major advances in the field, such as increasing numbers of students, practitioners, patients, colleges, universities, and hospitals, which all appear to reflect a booming state of Oriental medicine. But if we truly respect our tradition as a living organism and listen intently to the deeper layers of its pulse, it becomes evident that the original vitality of the system is expiring, although its true condition may be obscured by a steroidal glow on the surface.

The following is primarily an epitomized narrative of the development of TCM, the medical system that has monopolized the practice of Oriental medicine in mainland China, and that has come to serve as the main mold for the budding profession of Oriental medicine around the globe. It exposes a system that has been conditioned by a distinctly political agenda, and reveals its logo TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) as a grave misnomer–designating a medicine that is not at all aiming to preserve the traditional characteristics of Chinese medicine, but, on the contrary, to expurgate, reform, and control the classical and folkloric texture of the traditional record in the name of progress. Between the lines of this argument resides the warning that the progressive removal of the unique foundations of Chinese medicine is far more than just a philosophical issue. It affects the heart of our medicine itself, namely the nature of the clinical encounter and the quality and the results of therapy. It greatly diminishes, moreover, the unique edge that the traditional science of Chinese medicine has over allopathic medicine and its various offshoots.

Mine is thus an urgent call for a reevaluation of the direction and the fundamental convictions that we set for ourselves as individual Oriental medicine practitioners. Otherwise we may become thoroughly entrapped in the spiritless mechanisms of state agencies, insurance companies, and most of all, our modern mind that has been conditioned to fancy the unambiguous, standardized, packaged approach. It is admittedly an opinionated warning, but a sincere and, I believe, reasonably informed one. From both my own perspective and that of my most respected teachers in China (including high ranking administrators within the TCM system), modern TCM in East and West is about to reach the fall height of the classical tragedy–featuring the vainglorious protagonist luxuriating at lofty heights (i.e. mainstream acceptance and doctoral level ratification), while blindly cutting into the life supply line without having a clue of the consequences. All of these concerns, however, are accompanied by the sincere hope that my findings on TCM politics in mainland China do not necessarily reflect the true state of Oriental medicine in the West, and that thus directed concerns are due to the limited quality of my own personal experience.

First Impact: The Modernization of China During the Late 19th and Early 20th Century

The end of dynastic China marked a peak season for Chinese medicine. Although nearly every other aspect of society was in a state of collapse and disarray by the middle of the 19th century, the culture of traditional medicine was alive with the multihued color and texture of a 2,500 year-old art. There was the stimulating discourse between the newly founded fever school and the school of the neo-classicists, there were numerous scholar physicians publishing influential discourses, and there was the arcane realm of esoteric discipleship, alchemical experimentation, and the kaleidoscopic facets of folk wisdom that have always characterized the sensuous heart of the profession.

The advent of Western medicine presented the traditional healing tradition with its first major challenge from which it never completely recovered. It lost its rank as the one and only medicine (yixue) and became Chinese medicine (zhongyi), defined in contrast to Western medicine (xiyi). Immediately, however, there developed an early brand of progressive physicians who did not lament this situation, but attempted to integrate some of the paraphernalia of modern medicine into the traditional system. These pioneers are now collectively referred to as the Chinese-Western Integration School (zhong xi huitong pai). Main representatives are Wang Qingren (1768-1831), Tang Zonghai (1851-1908), Zhang Xichun (1860-1933), and Zhang Shouyi (1873-1934). It is important to note that these intial integrators, often cited by TCM administrators as early visionaries of their own system of integrated medicine, were not proponents of the hierarchical superiority of Western medicine, but rather tried to embody the traditional ideal of the broadly educated master physician.

It was their erudite skill level in the art, philosophy, and science of the traditional thought process that allowed them to break new ground by, for instance, categorizing Western drugs in energetic terms, or by relating the Triple Warmer to certain anatomical tissues described by Western medicine. Although it was their declared goal to incorporate some of the useful mechanics (yong) of Western medicine into the traditional mother body (ti) of Chinese medicine, their parameters remained clearly traditional at the core–as the programmatic title of Zhang Xichun?s collected writings announces, Chinese at Heart But Western Where Appropriate: Essays Investigating An Integrated Form of Medicine (Yixue Zhong Zhong Can Xi Lu, 1933).

This day in which curious Chinese physicians could explore the phenomenon of Western medicine from an equal footing was soon eclipsed by a period characterized by the through-and through hierarchically structured relationship which still defines the relationship between modern medicine and any traditional system of life science today. During the first half of the 20th century, a variety of events politicized Chinese medicine as the despicable symbol of everything old and backward. It became a pawn that reformers from all political camps sought to abolish. When this endeavor failed due to vehement public protest, the new stewards of state settled for banishing the unruly gargoyle of Chinese medicine into a controlled existence that was subject to not only a rigorous purge of diagnostic methods and therapeutic modalities, but–most damaging to its integrity as a system in its own right–the creeping replacement of its essential standards with the correct parameters of modern science.

The political voice of Sun Yat-sen, the leader of the Republican revolution that toppled the dynastic system in 1911, had been shaped before the backdrop of his Western science education, and always rumbled with the deep suspicion that its master harbored against the old system of medicine. Sun?s successor, Jiang Kai-shek, took this personal bias into the legislative arena and presented the radical proposal, A Case for the Abolishment of Old Medicine (feizhi jiuyi an).1 Although Jiang?s proposition was not implemented due to thousands of protesting doctors and patients who took their passionate disapproval to the streets, the production of anti-traditional sentiment in an official document had a tremendous impact on the general mood of Chinese medicine practice during the 1930s and 1940s.

Around the same time, the outlawed communist bandit Mao Zedong promulgated thoughts that were very similar to those of his nationalist adversary. In his Yan?an hideout, he wrote that old doctors, entertainers, snake oil salesmen, and street hawkers are all of the same sort.2 This brief line should have a truly devastating impact twenty-five years later when Mao?s works became the one and only source for the country’s definition of political truth. It served as the Red Guard?s main license for the uncompromising persecution of the rich culture of traditional medicine and its unique modes of practice, education, and theoretical discourse.

In Servitude at Mao?s Court: Chinese Communism and the Conception of TCM, 1953-1976

The years 1953-59 witnessed what appears like a remarkable reversal of Mao?s earlier views on Chinese medicine. Having graduated from the task of creating national respect for the hinterland thug who now donned the emperor?s robes, he began to gradually advance his private ambition of asserting leadership over the legion of budding communist countries around the world. This objective required the conception of a socialist model that distinguished itself from the Russian paradigm of Marxist-Leninism by incorporating the regional attributes of third world countries. Chinese medicine fit well into this general scheme, since it embodied a medicine that was self-reliant, among the people, native, and patriotic slogans that had been used to promote Mao’s unique brand of communism. Mao sensed, furthermore, that China was beginning to become overly dependent on the influx of Soviet goods and expertise, especially in the areas of Western medicine equipment and pharmaceutics. The catastrophic famines and the far-reaching collapse of infrastructure that followed the Russian walkout in 1961 were to dramatically confirm his premonitions.

It was for primarily political reasons, therefore, that Mao began to publicly embrace Chinese medicine during the mid-1950s. This was the time when he issued the famous calligraphy that graces the front pages of so many TCM publications: zhongguo yiyao xue shi yige weida baoku, yingdang nuli fajue jiayi tigao (Chinese medicine is a grand cache of knowledge that we should actively bring to light and further evolve). In the wake of this apparently new direction, two ministers of health, Wang Bing and He Cheng, had to resign due to their exclusive loyalty to the Western medical system that had made them trustworthy candidates for the position in the first place. In 1956, premier Zhou Enlai signed papers that authorized the immediate establishment of the first four colleges of Chinese medicine, namely Chengdu College of TCM, Beijing College of TCM, Shanghai College of TCM, and Guangzhou College of TCM, followed by Nanjing College of TCM the following year. At the same time, a group that was to become the influential voice of the first generation of institutional TCM teachers–all of them still trained under the pre-institutional model of discipleship education –formed in Beijing. They are generally referred to as the five elders (wu lao), including Qin Bowei from Shanghai, Cheng Shenwu from Beijing, and Ren Yingqiu, Li Chongren, and Yu Daoji from Sichuan.

As if to set a good example for the new course that he had outlined, Mao publicly ingested the traditional remedy Yin Qiao San (Lonicera and Forsythia Powder) when he fell ill during the historic announcement of the Great Leap Forward at the Chengdu Conference in 1957. He restrained his onetime prejudice against snake oil salesmen and allowed Li Shizhi and Peng Luxiang, both first generation elders of Chengdu College of TCM, to be present at his bedside for an entire night. In 1959, the political motives of Mao?s actions fully revealed themselves when he published his decreeing vision about the concept of Chinese-Western medicine integration (zhong xi yi jiehe). This edict, in essence, mandated the establishment of TCM–a medical system which restrains the wildness and the feudal elements of the traditional art by taking it out of the hands of its lineage holders and assigning it to the control of modern science, one of the most trusted tools of marxist-materialist ideology. Mao announced a nationwide search for 2,000 first rate Western medicine physicians who are to assist in the evolvement of Chinese medicine.3 Special Seminars for the Study of Chinese Medicine by Western Medicine Physicians On Leave (xiyi lizhi xuexi zhongyi ban) were established, administering bite-size pieces of a highly standardized extract of traditional knowledge over a period of 1-2 years.

Qualifying participants were required to hold or exceed the physician in chief rank within the Western medical system. Of 2,000 doctors who initially entered into the program, only about 10% graduated. This low success rate may in part be due to the fact that the study of Chinese medicine, even in abridged form, involves the memorization of scientific detail which all participants, including the successful graduates, had previously been conditioned to condemn as the nefarious byproduct of a social system riddled with feudalist superstition. Nevertheless, these Western doctors who participated in the traditional medicine reform efforts of the years 1959-62 came to provide the main pool for TCM administrative positions in later years.

Most top level TCM administrators of the 1980s and 1990s are, in fact, Western medicine graduates of the reform/integration seminars. This situation is the primary reason for the woeful plight of Chinese medicine under the TCM system?traditional medicine in mainland China is managed by individuals who for the most part, and often openly, entertain deep-seated suspicions against the field that they are supposed to represent. In a radical sense, the history of TCM can be described as the history of implementing anti-traditional sentiments into the general atmosphere of Chinese medicine education and practice. I personally know of very few TCM administrators who resort to traditional modalities when they become sick. TCM students and faculty, moreover, regularly take antibiotics when contracting a cold?because it is more convenient and works faster and better. One of the shocking personal memories that I associate with this topic is a conversation with the grandson of Li Shizhi (the founding elder of Chengdu College of TCM who once prescribed Yinqiao San to Mao Zedong)–himself a TCM doctor, scholar, and administrator at the College which is generally regarded as the most traditional among TCM institutions in China–in which he expressed concern about my enthusiasm for traditional herbology.

He flatly admonished me to curb my faith in the efficacy of Chinese medicine. Many of my more classically oriented teachers, therefore, cautiously asserted that Mao may have had good intentions at the time, but that the integration project marked the beginning of a process that ruined the true nature of traditional medicine. On the surface, however, this course of events gave a boost to the status of Chinese medicine. The government had encouraged individuals with scientific expert status to immerse themselves in the subject of indigenous medicine and foster the betterment of the field. Furthermore, for the first time TCM departments were established in many city hospitals. The actual result, still and all, was the genesis of a situation in which the old, clinically experienced Chinese medicine practitioners were barred from participating in major league TCM.

All of the doctors in charge were Western doctors with Chinese knowledge (xi xue zhong)?experts who styled their diagnosis entirely in Western terms, but sporadically included some cookbook-style Chinese medicine modalities in their approach. Distinguished folk physicians, unable to practice privately under the communist system, were accessible only in outpatient departments, or occasionally summoned for a second opinion. Many observers of this practice bitterly remark that if a remedy prescribed by one of these elders resulted in a cure, it was most likely that all the credit was given to the Western modalities?even though it was their ineffectiveness that had initiated the traditional consultation. Chinese medicine, after all, was not recognized anymore as a clinical science in its own right, and the traditional diagnostic approach of bianzheng (diagnosis by synthesis of pulse, tongue, and symptom profile) was progressively becoming eclipsed by the standardized procedure of bianbing (diagnosis by Western disease name).

In the aftermath of these events, the status of Western medicine became dramatically elevated with regard to institutionalized TCM education. Planned in 1961 and executed in 1962, all TCM colleges adopted a curriculum according to which incoming students first studied Western medicine for 2 ? years, then Chinese medicine for 2 ? years, and finally entered into an integrated clinical internship for one year. The five elders immediately realized that this educational setup was responsible for an increasing loss of respect for the fundamental principles of Chinese medicine, and composed a letter to the central government that summarized their concerns. Although their protest led to an abolishment of the new curriculum and ushered in a brief revival of classical values?spawning a college program that started out with three years of exclusive Chinese medicine training, including the reading and memorization of all major classics in their entirety, as well as palpation of 10,000 pulses and inspection of 2,000 tongues?the exigencies of the political sphere were soon to interfere in a most severe manner again.

In 1966, Mao found himself locked in an internal power struggle and unleashed the Great Cultural Revolution to neutralize his antagonists. For ten years, all forms of higher education came to a screeching halt. In the field of Chinese medicine, only the entering class of 1963 was able to complete a TCM curriculum that for the first time truly deserved the label traditional. Since it was the main rallying cry of the Cultural Revolution to eradicate every trace of feudalist influence, all of the old master practitioners of Chinese medicine, including the five elders, became subject to criticism, ridicule, and in some instances, public thrashing. As many physicians frantically burned their stitch-bound volumes and other old-fashioned belongings to avoid persecution, and as others died from grief or physical abuse, much of the physical legacy of Chinese medicine perished irretrievably.

In this vacuum, Western medicine reasserted its defining influence on TCM, while itself having to adapt to a political environment that despised erudite learning of any kind. Already during the previous year, in a speech given to health care professionals in Beijing on June 26, 1965, Mao had set the stage for the anti-intellectual direction of the new medicine to come. In paraphrased terms, he said that medicine needs to be changed, it is unnecessary for any doctor to read so many books. Hua Tuo, Li Shizhen, and other traditional doctors did not spend much time studying, but learned their trade in a clinical environment. Most of our hospitals are in the city, while the heart of China is in the countryside. The focal point of medicine practice and medicine education thus needs to be directed toward rural areas.4

During the years 1966-1971, therefore, no new students were admitted by any educational institution, including schools of Chinese medicine. In 1972, so called Colleges for Workers, Peasants, and Soldiers (gong nong bing xueyuan) were established, offering three year vocational programs under the maxime of open door schooling. This meant that there were no entry exams; the admission of students was entirely based on their political status as well as the social background of their parents. Textbooks were filled with quotes from Mao Zedong?s Collected Works. The doctors produced by this system received a very rudimentary training in both Chinese and Western modalities, and provided the human resource for the well-known Barefoot Doctor Movement (chijiao yisheng yundong). The barefoot doctors, naturally, were never introduced to the essential concept of differential diagnostics. Meanwhile, the generation of Chinese medicine elders was either dead or locked up as bovine demons and snake-like goblins (niugui sheshen) in so called ox stalls (niupeng). Of the five elders, only Ren Yingqiu was still alive. He was banished to Qinghai Province, China?s equivalent to Siberia–allowed to bring only one cherished book, Li Shizhen?s Outline of the Materia Medica (Bencao Gangmu).

In the Name of Progress: The Introduction of Superior Methodology, Scientific Standards, and Research Axioms During the 1980s and 1990s

Another blow to the integrity of the traditional system, or what was left of it, occurred during the period of 1980-85. At this time, the concept of Chinese medicine improvement by methodology research (zhongyi fangfa lun yanjiu) was introduced. The political leaders of TCM colleges, i.e. the communist party secretaries who are generally more influential than the president, selected several fashionable theories of Western science and applied them to the domain of Chinese medicine?once again motivated by the habituated resolve to further evolve the field. These endeavors were generally characterized by the attempt to sanctify the scientific character of selected aspects of Chinese medicine, and consequently, by denying scientific validity (and the ensuing right to be preserved and transmitted) to others. During the period in question, the theories elected for this purpose were cybernetics (kongzhi lun), system science (xitong lun), and information theory (xinxi lun).

The result of this assistance was the affirmation of the TCM system on theoretical grounds. The methodologists concluded that Chinese medicine classics such as the Yellow Emperor?s Classic of Medicine (Huangdi Neijing) already contain evidence of these progressive theories in embryonic form, apparently recommending an affirmative stance toward the tradition of Chinese medicine. On the other hand, this position always implied that the classics were like dinosaurs–interesting to look at in a museum, but, in terms of their pragmatic value in a contemporary environment, vastly inferior to the eloquent treatises of informatics, cybernetics, and other domains of modern science. As a result, many TCM colleges actually established museums, and many publishers dared again to issue reprint editions of classical texts. The original regard for the classics as the primary source of clinical information, however, dwindled as the presence of original texts in the curriculum became minimized. Again, it was a situation where a group of individuals with no traditional medical background attempted to reform Chinese medicine?motivated by ideological rather than clinical considerations.

The 1990s, in the opinion of many of my more classically oriented teachers and myself, have seen the most severe erosion of traditional core values. I will cite the following reasons for this assessment:

Due to market driven priorities, none of the numerous TCM journals make an effort anymore to cover the philosophical foundations of Chinese medicine. The government, furthermore, provides no money for the traditional category of textual research (which had been a possible area of specialization for graduate students until 1988), and no graduate research projects are permissible that involve only Chinese medicine theory.

The new market economy obliges TCM hospitals to be profitable. The subject of profitability is intimately tied to a standardized fee structure that is based on an official ranking system–which, in turn, is defined by Western medicine values, such as the quantity of modern diagnostic equipment and the amount of available beds. The hospitals thus devote a tremendous amount of effort to the acquisition and application of paraphernalia that will boost both their quality ranking and their diagnostic income. As one TCM physician put it, little money is to be made by just feeling the pulse. This tendency is echoed in private street clinics, where doctors are encouraged, even required, by the herbal pharmacies that employ them to prescribe large amounts of preferably expensive herbs to maximize profits.

In 1994-95, the ministry of health published a host of official guidelines aimed at standardizing the mandatory process of researching the effect of new patent remedies.5 Along with the establishment of a Chinese FDA, it was decreed that the research of Chinese medicine patents must be conducted according to the standards of Western pharmaceutical research. Most consequentially, this meant that the traditional system of differential diagnosis (bianzheng) had to be completely replaced by allopathic diagnostics (bianbing). According to these guidelines, research on the constitutional multi-purpose remedy Four Frigid Extremities Powder (Sini San), for instance, must be conducted and marketed in the context of only one diagnostic category, i.e. cholecystitis. Theoretical background research into the traditional rationale of a remedy is confined to 10% of the proposal, while disease oriented research has to account for 70%. Another point that mirrors the research protocol of Western medicine is the obligatory focus on laboratory animal research.

This development hasstarted to turn the broadly defined clinical science of Chinese medicine into a discipline that is dominated by the narrowly defined and, most importantly, completely disparate parameters of modern pharmacology. It finalizes the process of evolution by integration that Mao had originally prescribed for Chinese medicine 40 years ago?a process that involves gutting the indigenous art, spirit and all, and subsequently appropriating its material hull (i.e. herbs and techniques) into the realm of a medicine that declares itself scientifically superior.

A new class of graduate students is developing who cannot diagnose in differential terms at all anymore, but are completely steeped in the allopathic system of medical terminology and diagnosis. Virtually all of the doctoral theses presently produced in China fall into the field of Chinese-Western integration research, or laboratory animal research related to the ratification of new patent remedies. Integrated standards for students of Chinese and Western medicine, moreover, have produced the grotesque situation where Chinese medicine researchers are required to utilize unwarranted equipment such as electron microscopes to achieve doctoral level approbation. In addition to the conceptual crisis outlined in this paper, the bastion of Chinese TCM is thus also facing a grave financial crisis. Most institutions simply cannot keep up with the steeply rising cost of the very narrowly defined type of research that the system prescribes.

Of an impressive sounding five years in the present bachelor curriculum, much is taken up by classes in foreign language, physical education, political studies, and computer training. By far the most extensive classes are dedicated to Western medicine contents such as anatomy, physiology, immunology, parasitology, and other topics that are unrelated to the diagnostic and therapeutic procedures of classical Chinese medicine. From both a quantitative and a qualitative perspective, therefore, it would not be entirely inappropriate to state in slightly dramatized terms that the Chinese medicine portion in the contemporary TCM curriculum has been reduced to the status of a peripheral supplement?approximately 40% or less of the total amount of hours. This issue is compounded by the ongoing division of students into Western-style areas of specialization, such as acupuncture or bone disorders. None of the specialty students, including acupuncture department graduates, are required anymore to familiarize themselves with the realm of original teachings, not even in the radically abridged form of classical quotations that still serve to bestow an air of legitimacy on most official TCM textbooks.

Bioelectrodynamics Laboratory, Open University, Walton Hall,
Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA, U.K.
Journal of Consciousness Studies 3, 231-244, 1996.

Abstract
I. Introduction
* The new organicism
II. The organism frees itself from the `laws’ of physics
III. The organism is free from mechanical determinism
* The polychromatic organism
* The organism is a free sentient being
and hence able to decide its own fate

IV. The organism frees itself from mechanistic control
as an interconnected, intercommunicating whole
* Long-range energy continua in cells and tissues
* Organism and environment — a mutual partnership
V. The organism as an autonomous coherent whole
* Organisms are polyphasic liquid crystals
* Quantum coherence in living organisms
* The freedom of organisms
Acknowledgments
Notes
References

Abstract: According to Bergson (1916), the traditional problem of free will is misconceived and arises from a mismatch between the quality of authentic, subjective experience and its description in language, in particular, the language of the mechanistic science of psychology. Contemporary western scientific concepts of the organism, on the other hand, are leading us beyond conventional thermodynamics as well as quantum theory and offering rigorous insights which reaffirm and extend our intuitive, poetic, and even romantic notions of spontaneity and free will. I shall describe some new views of the organism arising from new findings in biology, in order to show how, in freeing itself from the `laws’ of physics, from mechanical determinism and mechanistic control, the organism becomes a sentient, coherent being that is free, from moment to moment, to explore and create its possible futures. * Based on a lecture delievered at the 6th Mind & Brain Symposium, The Science of Consciousness — The Nature of Free Will, November 4, 1995, Institute of Psychiatry, London.

I. Introduction

Distinguished neurophysiologist Walter Freeman (1995) begins his latest book by declaring brain science “in crisis”: his personal quest to define constant psychological states arising from given stimuli has ended in failure after 33 years. Patterns of brain activity are simply unrepeatable, every perception is influenced by all that has gone before. The impasse, he adds, is conceptual, not experimental or logical. This acknowledged breakdown of mechanical determinism in brain science is really long overdue, but it should not be miscontrued as the triumph of vitalism. As Freeman goes on to show, recent developments in nonlinear mathematics can contribute to some understanding of these non-repeatable brain activities. The traditional opposition between mechanists and vitalists already began to dissolve at the turn of the present century, when Newtonian physics gave way to quantum theory at the very small scales of elementary particles and to general relativity at the large scales of planetary motion. The static, deterministic universe of absolute space and time is replaced by a multitude of contingent, observer-dependent space-time frames. Instead of mechanical objects with simple locations in space and time, one finds delocalized, mutually entangled quantum entities that carry their histories with them, like evolving organisms. These developments in contemporary western science gave birth to organicist philosophy.

A key figure in organicist philosophy was the French philosopher, Henri Bergson (1916), who showed how Newtonian concepts — which dominate biological sciences then and now — negate psychology’s claims to understand our inner experience at the very outset. In particular, he drew attention to the inseparability of space and time, both tied to real processes that have characteristic durations. The other major figure in organicist philosophy was the English mathematician-philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead (1925) who saw physics itself and all of nature, as unintelligible without a thorough-going theory of the organism that participates in knowing. Organicist philosophy was taken very seriously by a remarkable group of people who formed the multidisciplinary Theoretical Biology Club.[1] Its membership included Joseph Needham, eminent embryologist/biochemist later to be renowned for his work on the history of Chinese science, Dorothy Needham, muscle physiologist and biochemist, geneticist C.H. Waddington, crystallographer J.D. Bernal, mathematician Dorothy Wrinch, philosopher, J.H. Woodger and physicist, Neville Mott. They acknowledged the full complexity of living organization, not as axiomatic, but as something to be explained and understood with the help of philosophy as well as physics, chemistry, biology and mathematics, as those sciences advance, and in the spirit of free enquiry, leaving open whether new concepts or laws may be discovered in the process.

A lot has happened since the project of the Theoretical Biology Club was brought to a premature end when they failed to obtain funding from the Rockefeller Foundation. Organicism has not survived as such, but its invisible ripples have spread and touched the hearts and minds, and the imagination of many who remain drawn to the central enigma that Erwin Schr?dinger (1944) later posed: What is Life?

In the intervening years, the transistor radio, the computer and lasers have been invented. Whole new disciplines have been created, nonequilibrium thermodynamics, solid state physics and quantum optics to name but a few. In mathematics, nonlinear dynamics and chaos theory took off in a big way during the 1960s and 70s. Perhaps partly on account of that, many nonlinear physical and physicochemical phenomena are being actively investigated only within the past ten years, as physics become more and more organic in its outlook. In a way, the whole of science is now tinged with organicist philosophy, as even “consciousness” and “free will” are on the scientific agenda. Bergson ( 1916) has made a persuasive case that the traditional problem of free will is simply misconceived and arises from a mismatch between the quality of authentic, subjective experience and its description in language, in particular, the language of the mechanistic science of psychology. In a recent book, I have shown how contemporary western scientific concepts of the organism are leading us beyond conventional thermodynamics as well as quantum theory (Ho, 1993), and offering rigorous insights which reaffirm and extend our intuitive, poetic, and even romantic notions of spontaneity and free will.

The new organicism

I am making a case for organicist science. It is not yet a conscious movement but a Zeitgeist I personally embrace, so I really mean to persuade you to do likewise by giving it a more tangible shape. The new organicism, like the old, is dedicated to the knowledge of the organic whole, hence, it does not recognize any discipline boundaries. It is to be found between all disciplines. Ultimately, it is an unfragmented knowledge system by which one lives. There is no escape clause allowing one to plead knowledge `pure’ or `objective’, and hence having nothing to do with life. As with the old organicism, the knowing being participates in knowing as much as in living. Participation implies responsibility, which is consistent with the truism that there can be no freedom without responsibility, and conversely, no responsiblity without freedom. There is no placing mind outside nature as Descartes has done, the knowing being is wholeheartedly within nature: heart and mind, intellect and feeling (Ho, 1994a). It is non-dualist and holistic. In all those respects, its affinities are with the participatory knowledge systems of traditional indigenous cultures all over the world. From a thorough-going organicist perspective, one does not ask, “What is life?” but, “What is it to be alive?”. Indeed, the best way to know life is to live it fully. It must be said that we do not yet have a fully fledged organicist science. But I shall describe some new images of the organism, starting from the more familiar and working up, perhaps to the most sublime, from which a picture of the organism as a free, spontaneous being will begin to emerge. I shall show how the organism succeeds in freeing itself from the `laws’ of physics, from mechanical determinism and mechanistic control, thereby becoming a sentient, coherent being that, from moment to moment, freely explores and creates its possible futures.

II. The organism frees itself from the `laws’ of physics

I put `laws’ in quotation marks in order to emphasize that they are not laid down once and for all, and especially not to dictate what we can or cannot think. They are tools for helping us think; and most of all, to be transcended if necessary.

Many physicists have marvelled at how organisms seem able to defy the Second Law of Thermodynamics, starting from Lord Kelvin, co-inventor of the Second Law, who nevertheless excluded organisms from its dominion:
“The animal body does not act as a thermodynamic engine . . . consciousness teaches every individual that they are, to some extent, subject to the direction of his will. It appears therefore that animated creatures have the power of immediately applying to certain moving particles of matter within their bodies, forces by which the motions of these particles are directed to produce derived mechanical effects.”[2]

What impresses Lord Kelvin is how organisms seem to have energy at will, whenever and wherever required, and in a perfectly coordinated way. Another equally puzzling feature is that, contrary to the Second Law, which says all systems should decay into equilibrium and disorder, organisms develop and evolve towards ever increasing organization. Of course, there is no contradiction, as the Second Law applies to isolated systems, whereas organisms are open systems. But how do organisms manage to maintain themselves far away from thermodynamic equilibrium and to produce increasing organization? Schr?dinger writes:

“It is by avoiding the rapid decay into the inert state of `equilibrium’ that an organism appears so enigmatic. . . . What an organism feeds upon is negative entropy, or, to put it less paradoxically, the essential thing in metabolism is that the organism succeeds in freeing itself from all the entropy it cannot help producing while alive.”[3]

Schr?dinger was severely reprimanded,[4] by Linus Pauling and others, for using the term `negative entropy’, for it really does not correspond to any rigorous thermodynamic entity. However, the idea that open systems can “self-organize” under energy flow became more concrete in the discovery of “dissipative structures” (Prigogine, 1967). An example is the B?nard convection cells that arise in a pan of water heated uniformly from below. At a critical temperature difference between the top and the bottom, a phase transition occurs: bulk flow begins as the lighter, warm water rises from the bottom and the denser, cool water sinks. The whole pan eventually settles down to a regular honeycomb array of flow cells. Before phase transition, all the molecules move randomly with respect to one another. However, at a critical rate of energy supply, the system self-organizes into global dynamic order in which all the astronomical numbers of molecules are moving in formation as though choreographed to do so.

A still more illuminating physical metaphor for the living system is the laser (Haken, 1977), in which energy is pumped into a cavity containing atoms capable of emitting light. At low levels of pumping, the atoms emit randomly as in an ordinary lamp. As the pumping rate is increased, a threshold is reached when all the atoms oscillate together in phase, and send out a giant light track that is a million times as long as that emitted by individual atoms. Both examples illustrate how energy input or energy pumping and dynamic order are intimately linked.

These and other considerations led me to identify Schr?dinger’s “negative entropy” as “stored mobilizable energy in a space-time structured system” ( Ho, 1994b, 1995a). The key to understanding the thermodynamics of living systems turns out not so much to be energy flow but energy storage under energy flow (Fig. 1). Energy flow is of no consequence unless the energy can be trapped and stored within the system where it circulates to do work before dissipating. A reproducing life cycle, i.e., an organism, arises when the loop of circulating energy is closed. At that point, we have a life cycle, within which stored energy is mobilized, remaining largely stored as it is mobilized.

The life cycle is a highly differentiated space-time structure, the predominant modes of activity are themselves cycles spanning an entire gamut of space-times from the local and fast (or slow) to the global and slow (or fast), all of which are coupled together. These cycles are most familiar to us in the form of biological rhythms extending over 20 orders of magnitude of time, from electrical activities of neurons and other cells to circadian and circa-annual rhythms and beyond. An intuitive picture is given in Figure 2, where coupled cycles of different sizes are fed by the one-way energy flow. This complex, entangled space-time structure is strongly reminiscent of Bergson’s “durations” of organic processes, which necessitates a different way of conceptualizing space-time as heterogeneous, nonlinear, multidimensional and nonlocal (see Ho, 1993).[5]

On account of the complete spectrum of coupled cycles, energy is stored and mobilized over all space-times according to the relaxation times (and volumes) of the processes involved. So, organisms can take advantage of two different ways of mobilizing energy with maximum efficiency — nonequilbrium transfer in which stored energy is transferred before it is thermalized, and quasi-equilibrium transfer, for which the free energy change approaches zero according to conventional thermodynamic considerations (McClare, 1971). Energy input into any mode can be readily delocalized over all modes, and conversely, energy from all modes can become concentrated into any mode. In other words, energy coupling in the living system is symmetrical, which is why we can have energy at will, whenever and wherever required (see Ho, 1993, 1994b, 1995a,b). The organism is, in effect, a closed, self-sufficient energetic domain of cyclic non-dissipative processes coupled to the dissipative processes. In the formalism of conventional thermodynamics, the life cycle can be considered, to first approximation, to consist of all those cyclic processes — for which the net entropy change balances out to zero — coupled to those dissipative processes necessary for keeping it going, for which the net entropy change is greater than zero (see Figure 3). This representation, justified in detail elsewhere (Ho, 1996a), is derived from the thermodynamics of the steady state (see Denbigh, 1951).

Consequently, the organism has freed itself from the immediate constraints of energy conservation — the First Law — as well as the Second Law of thermodynamics. There is always energy available within the system, which is mobilized at close to maximum efficiency and over all space-time modes. [6]

III. The organism is free from mechanical determinism

It was geneticist/embryologist C.H. Waddington (1957) who first introduced nonlinear dynamical ideas into developmental biology in the form of the `epigenetic landscape’ — a general metaphor for the dynamics of the developmental process. The developmental paths of tissues and cells are seen to be constrained or canalized to `flow’ along certain valleys and not others due to the `force’ exerted on the landscape by the various gene products which define the fluid topography of the landscape.[7] This fluid topography contains multiple potential developmental pathways that may be realized as the result of “fluctuations”, or if the environmental conditions, the genes or gene products change. This metaphor has been made much more explicit recently by mathematician Peter Saunders (1992) who shows that the properties of the epigenetic landscape are “common not just to developing organisms but to most nonlinear dynamical systems.”

The polychromatic organism

A particular kind of nonlinearity which has made headlines recently is `deterministic chaos’: a complex dynamical behaviour that is locally unpredictable and irregular, which has been used to describe many living functions including the collective behaviour of ant colonies (see Goodwin, 1994). The unrepeatable patterns of brain activities that persuaded Freeman ( 1995) to declare brain science in crisis are typical of systems exhibiting deterministic chaos. Another putative example is the heart beat, which is found to be much more irregular in healthy people than in cardiac patients.[8] Physiologist Goldberger (1991) came to the conclusion that healthy heartbeat has “a type of variability called chaos”, and that loss of this “complex variability” is associated with pathology and with aging. Similarly, the electrical activities of the functioning brain, apart from being unrepeatable from moment to moment, also contain many frequencies. But during epileptic fits, the spectrum is greatly impoverished (Kandel, Schwartz and Jessell, 1991 ). There is much current debate as to whether these complex variabilities associated with the healthy, functional state constitute chaos in the technical sense, so the question is by no means settled (Glass and Mackey, 1988).

A different understanding of the complex activity spectrum of the healthy state is that it is polychromatic (Ho, 1996c), approaching `white’ in the ideal, in which all the modes of energy storage are equally represented. It corresponds to the so-called f(l) = const. rule that Popp (1986) has generalized from the spectrum of light or “biophotons” found to be emitted from all living systems. I have proposed that this polychromatic ideal distribution of stored energy is the state towards which all open systems capable of energy storage naturally evolve (Ho, 1994b). It is a state of both maximum and minimum in entropy content: maximum because energy becomes equally distributed over all the space-time modes (hence the `white’ ideal), and minimum because the modes are all coupled or linked together to give a coherent whole, in other words, to a single degree of freedom (Popp, 1986; Ho, 1993). In a system where there is no impedance to energy mobilization, all the modes are intercommunicating and hence all the frequencies will be represented. Instead, when coupling is imperfect, or when the subsystem, say, the heart, or the brain, is not communicating properly, it falls back on its own modes, leading to impoverishment of its activity spectrum. Living systems are necessarily a polychromatic whole, they are full of colour and variegated complexity that nevertheless cohere into a singular being.

The organism is a free sentient being and hence able to decide its own fate

One distinguishing feature of the living system is its exquisite sensitivity to weak signals. For example, the eye can detect single photons falling on the retina, and the presence of several molecules of pheromones in the air is sufficient to attract male insects to their appropriate mates. That extreme sensitivity of the organism applies to all levels and is the direct consequence of its energy self-sufficiency. No part of the system has to be pushed or pulled into action, nor be subjected to mechanical regulation and control. Instead, coordinated action of all the parts depends on rapid intercommunication throughout the system. The organism is a system of “excitable media” (see Goodwin, 1994, 1995), or excitable cells and tissues poised to respond specifically and disproportionately (i.e., nonlinearly) to weak signals because of the large amount of energy stored, which can thus amplify the weak signal into macroscopic action. It is by virtue of its energy self-sufficiency, therefore, that an organism is a sentient being — a system of sensitive parts all set to intercommunicate, to respond and to act appropriately as a whole to any contingency. The organism is indeed free from mechanical determinism, but it does not thereby fall prey to indeterminacy. Far from surrendering its fate to the indeterminacy of nonlinear dynamics (or quantum theory, for that matter), the organism maximizes its opportunities inherent in the multiplicity of futures available to it. I have argued elsewhere that indeterminacy is really the problem of the ignorance of the external observer, and not experienced by the being itself, who has full knowledge of its own state, and can readily adjust, respond and act in the most appropriate manner (Ho, 1993). In a very real sense, the organism is free to decide its own fate because it is a sentient being who has moment to moment, up-to-date knowledge of its own internal milieu as well as the external environment.

IV. The organism frees itself from mechanistic control as an interconnected, intercommunicating whole

This idea has become very concrete as the result of recent advances in biochemistry, cell biology and genetics. A molecular democracy of distributed control There are thousands of enzymes catalyzing thousands of energy transactions and metabolic transformations in our body. The product of one enzyme is acted on by one or more other enzymes, resulting in a highly interconnected metabolic network. Henrik Kacser (1987) was among the first to realize that once we have a network, especially one as complicated as the metabolic network, it is unrealistic to think that there could be special enzymes controlling the flow of metabolites under all circumstances. He and a colleague pioneered metabolic control analysis, to discover how the network is actually regulated under different conditions. After more than 20 years of investigation by many biochemists and cell biologists, it is now generally recognized that so-called `control’ is invariably distributed over many enzymes (and metabolites) in the network, and moreover, the distribution of control differs under different conditions. The metabolic network turns out to be a “molecular democracy” of distributed control.

Long-range energy continua in cells and tissues

Recent studies have also revealed that energy mobilization in living systems is achieved by protein or enzyme molecules acting as “flexible molecular energy machines” (see Ho, 1995a), which transfer energy directly from the point of release to the point of utilization, without thermalization or dissipation. These direct energy transfers are carried out in collective modes extending from the molecular to the macroscopic domain. The flow of metabolites is channeled coherently at the molecular level, from one enzyme to the next in sequence, in multi-enzyme complexes (see Welch and Clegg, 1987 ). At the same time, high voltage electron microscopy and other physical measurement techniques reveal that the cell is more like a `solid state’ than the `bag of dissolved enzymes’ that generations of biochemists had previously supposed (Clegg, 1984). Not only are almost all enzymes bound to an intricate “microtrabecular lattice”, but a large proportion of metabolites as well as water molecules are also structured on the enormous surfaces available. Aqueous channels are now thought to be involved in the active transport of solutes within the cell in the same way that the blood stream transport metabolites and chemical messengers within the organism (Wheatley and Clegg, 1991). Joseph Needham (1936) and his colleagues were already aware of all that some sixty years ago.

As Welch and Berry (1985) propose, the whole cell is linked up by “long-range energy continua” of mechanical interactions, electric and eletrochemical fluxes and in particular, proton currents that form a “protoneural network”, whereby metabolism is regulated instantly and down to minute detail. In addition, the possibility that cells and tissues are also linked by electromagnetic phonons and photons is increasingly entertained (see Popp, Li and Gu, 1992; Ho, 1993; Ho, Popp and Warnke, 1994). As I shall show later, the cell (as well as organism) is not so much a “solid state” as liquid crystalline. Living systems, therefore, possess just the conditions that favour the rapid propagation of influences in all directions, so that local and global can no longer be easily distinguished. Global phase transitions may often take place, which can be initiated at any point within the system or subsystem. Freeman and Barrie (1994) have described abrupt, phase-transition like changes that typically occur in the eeg of whole areas of the brain, recorded simultaneously with a large array of electrodes, for which no definite centre(s) of origin can be identified.[9]

Organism and environment — a mutual partnership

Biology today remains dominated by the genetic paradigm. Genes are seen to be the repository of information that controls the development of the organism, but are otherwise insulated from the environment, and passed on unchanged to the next generation except for rare random mutations. The much publicized Human Genome Project is being promoted on that very basis.[10] Yet, the genetic paradigm has already been fatally undermined at least ten years ago, when a plethora of `fluid genome’ processes were first discovered, and many more have come to light since. These processes destabilize and alter genes and genomes in the course of development, some of the genetic changes are so well correlated with the environment that they are referred to as “directed mutations”. Many of the genetic changes are then passed on to the next generation. I pointed out at the time that heredity can no longer be seen to reside solely in the DNA passed on from one generation to the next. Instead, the stability and repeatability of development — which we recognize as heredity — is distributed in the whole gamut of dynamic feedback interrelationships between organism and environment, from the socioecological to the genetic. All these may leave imprints that are passed on to subsequent generations, in the form of cultural traditions or artefacts, maternal or cytoplasmic effects, gene expression states, as well as genetic (DNA sequence) changes.

The organism is highly interconnected and intercommunicating at all levels extending from within the cell to the socioecological environment. It is on that account that the organism has freed itself from mechanistic controls of any kind. It is not a passive object at the mercy of random variation and natural selection, but an active participants in the evolutionary drama.[11] In constantly responding to and transforming its environment, it partakes in creating the possible futures of generations to come.

V. The organism as an autonomous coherent whole

The concept of coherence has emerged within the past 20 years to describe the wholeness of the organism. The first detailed theory of coherence of the organism was presented by Herbert Fr?hlich (1968; 1980) who argued that as organisms are made up of strongly dipolar molecules packed rather densely together (c.f. the `solid state’ cell), electric and elastic forces will constantly interact. Metabolic pumping will excite macromolecules such as proteins and nucleic acids as well as cellular membranes (which typically have an enormous electric field of some 107V/m across them). These will start to vibrate and eventually build up into collective modes, or coherent excitations, of both phonons and photons (sound and light) that extend over macroscopic distances within the organism and perhaps also outside the organism. The emission of electromagnetic radiation from coherent lattice vibrations in a solid-state semi-conductor has recently been experimentally demonstrated for the first time (Dekorsy et al, 1995). The possibility that organisms may use electromagnetic radiations to communicate between cells was already entertained by Soviet biologist Gurwitsch (1925) early this century.This hypothesis was revived by Popp and his coworkers in the late 1970s, and there is now a large and rapidly growing literature on “biophotons” that are believed to be emitted from a coherent photon field (or energy storage field) within the living system (see Popp, Li and Gu, 1992). We have indeed found that a single, one minute, exposure of synchronously developing early fruitfly embryos to white light results in the re-emission of relatively intense and prolonged flashes of light, some tens of minutes and even hours after the light exposure (Ho et al, 1992b). This is reminiscent of phase-correlated collective emission, or superradiance, in physical systems, although the timescale is orders of magnitude longer. For phase-correlation to build up over the entire population, one must assume that each embryo has a collective phase of all its activities, in other words, each embryo must be considered a highly coherent domain, despite its multiplicity of activities (Ho, Zhou and Haffegee, 1995). Actually, this is no different from the macroscopic phase correlations that are involved in the synchronous flashing of huge populations of fireflies (Strogatz and Mirollo, 1988), and in many physiological functions, such as limb coordination during locomotion (Collin and Stewart, 1992; Kelso, 1991) and coupling between heart rate and respiratory rate (Breithaupt, 1989). Under those conditions, whole limbs or entire circulatory and respiratory systems must be considered coherent domains which can maintain definite phase relationships with respect to one another.

During the same early period of development in Drosophila, exposure of the embryos to weak static magnetic fields also cause characteristic global transformation of the normal segmental body pattern to helical configurations in the larvae emerging 24 hours later (Ho et al, 1992a). As the energies involved are well below the thermal threshold, we conclude that there can be no effect unless the external field is acting on a coherent field where charges are moving in phase, or where magnetically sensitive liquid crystals are undergoing phase alignment globally (Ho, et al, 1994). Liquid crystals may indeed be the material basis of many, if not all aspects of biological organization (Ho et al, 1996).

Organisms are polyphasic liquid crystals

Liquid crystals are phases of matter between the solid and the liquid states, hence the term, mesophases (DeGennes, 1974). Liquid crystalline mesophases possess long range orientational order (all the molecules pointing in the same direction), and often also varying degrees of translational order (the individual molecules keep to their positions to varying extents). In contrast to solid crystals, liquid crystals are mobile and flexible, and above all, highly responsive. They undergo rapid changes in orientation or phase transitions when exposed to electric or magnetic fields (Blinov, 1983) or to changes in temperature, pressure, pH, hydration, and concentrations of inorganic ions (Collings, 1990; Knight, 1993). These properties are ideal for organisms (Gray, 1993; Knight, 1993). Liquid crystals in organisms include all its major constituents; the lipids of cellular membranes, the DNA in chromosomes, all proteins, especially cytoskeletal proteins, muscle proteins, collagens and other macromolecules of connective tissues. These adopt a multiplicity of different mesophases that may be crucial for biological structure and function at all levels of organization (Ho et al, 1996) from channeling metabolites in the cell to pattern determination and the coordinated locomotion of whole organisms.

The importance of liquid crystals for living organization was recognized by Joseph Needham (1936) among others. He suggested that living systems actually are liquid crystals, and that many liquid crystalline mesophases may exist in the cell although they cannot then be detected. Indeed, there has been no direct evidence that extensive liquid crystalline mesophases exist in living organisms or in the cytoplasm until our recent discovery of a noninvasive optical technique (Ho and Lawrence, 1993; Ho and Saunders, 1994; Newton, Haffegee and Ho, 1995). This enables us to obtain high resolution and high contrast coloured images of live organisms based on visualizing just the kind of coherent liquid crystalline mesophases which Needham and others had predicted.

The technique effectively allows us to see the whole of the living organism at once from its macroscopic activities down to the phase alignment of the molecules that make up its tissues. Brilliant optical colours are generated which are specific for each tissue, dependent on the molecular structure and the degree of coherent alignment of all the molecules, even as the molecules are moving about busily transforming energy. This is possible because visible light vibrates much faster than the molecules can move, so the tissues will appear indistinguishable from static crystals to the light passing through so long as the movements of the constituent molecules are sufficiently coherent. With this imaging technique, one can see that the organism is thick with activities at all levels, which are coordinated in a continuum from the macroscopic to the molecular. And that is what the coherence of the organism entails.

These images also bring out another aspect of the wholeness of the organism: all organisms, from protozoa to vertebrates without exception, are polarized along the anteroposterior axis, so that all the colours in the different tissues of the body are at a maximum when the anteroposterior axis is appropriately aligned, and they change in concert as the organism is rotated from that position. The anteroposterior axis acts as the optical axis for the whole organism, which behaves in effect, as a single crystal. This leaves us in little doubt that the organism is a singular whole, despite the diverse multiplicity and polychromatic nature of its constituent parts. The tissues not only maintain their crystalline order when they are actively transforming energy, the degree of order seems to depend on energy transformation, in that the more active and energetic the organism, the more intensely colorful it is, implying that the molecular motions are all the more coherent (Ho and Saunders, 1994; Ho et al, 1996). The coherence of the organism is therefore closely tied up with its energetic status, as argued in the beginning of this essay: the coherent whole is full of energy — it is a vibrant coherent whole.

Quantum coherence in living organisms

The above considerations and observations show that the essence of organic wholeness is that it is distributed throughout its constituent parts so that local and global, part and whole are completely indistinguishable — the organism’s activities being always fully coordinated in a continuum from the molecular to the macroscopic. That convinces me (as argued in detail in Ho, 1993, also Ho, 1996a) that there is something very special about the wholeness of organisms that is only fully captured by quantum coherence.[12] An intuitive appreciation of quantum coherence is to think of the `I’ that each and every one of us experience of our own being. We know that our body is a multiplicity of organs and tissues, composed of many billions of cells and astronomical numbers of molecules of many different kinds, all capable of working autonomously, and yet somehow cohering into the singular being of our private experience. That is just the stuff of quantum coherence. Quantum coherence does not mean that everybody or every element of the system must be doing the same thing all the time, it is more akin to a grand ballet, or better yet, a very large jazz band where everyone is doing his or her own thing while being perfectly in step and in tune with the whole. A quantum coherent system maximizes both global cohesion and local freedom ( Ho, 1993). This property is technically referred to as factorizability, the correlations between subsystems resolving neatly into self-correlations so that the subsystems behave as though they are independent of one another. It enables the body to be performing all sorts of different but coordinated functions simultaneously (Ho, 1995b). It also enables instantaneous, as well as noiseless intercommunication to take place throughout the system.[13] As I am writing, my digestive system is working independently, my metabolism busily transforming chemical energy in all my cells, putting some away in the longer term stores of fat and glycogen, while converting most of it into readily utilizable forms such as ATP. Similarly, my muscles are keeping in tone and allowing me to work the keyboard, while, hopefully, my neurons are firing in wonderfully coherent patterns in my brain. Nevertheless, if the telephone should ring in the middle of all this, I would turn to pick it up without hesitation.

The importance of factorizability is evoked by the movie character, Dr. Strangelove, portrayed by Peter Sellers as a megalomaniac scientist who wanted to rule the world. He was a wheelchair-bound paraplegiac, who could not speak without raising his arm in the manner of a Nazi salute. That is just the symptom of the loss of factorizability which is the hallmark of quantum coherence.

The coherent organism is, in the ideal, a quantum superposition of activities — organized according to their characteristic space-times — each itself coherent, so that it can couple coherently to the rest (Ho, 1995b; 1996a). This picture is fully consistent with the earlier proposal that the organism stores energy over all space-time domains each intercommunicating (or coupled) with the rest. Quantum superposition also enables the system to maximize its potential degrees of freedom so that the single degree of freedom required for coherent action can be instantaneously accessed.

The freedom of organisms

The organism maximizes both local freedom and global intercommunication. One comes to the startling discovery that the coherent organism is in a very real sense completely free. Nothing is in control, and yet everything is in control. Thus, it is the failure to transcend the mechanistic framework that makes people persist in enquiring which parts are in control, or issuing instructions; or whether free will exists, and who choreographs the dance of molecules. Does “consciousness” control matter or vice versa? These questions are meaningless when one understands what it is to be a coherent, organic whole. An organic whole is an entangled whole, where part and whole, global and local are so thoroughly implicated as to be indistinguishable, and each part is as much in control as it is sensitive and responsive. Choreographer and dancer are one and the same. The `self’ is a domain of coherent activities, in the ideal, a pure state that permeates the whole of our being with no definite localizations or boundaries, as Bergson has described. The positing of `self’ as a domain of coherent activities implies the existence of an active whole agent who is free. I must stress that freedom does not entail the breakdown of causality as many commentators have mistakenly supposed. On the contrary, an acausal world would be one where it is impossible to be free, as nothing would be intelligible. Nevertheless, freedom does entail a new kind of organic causality that is nonlocal, and posited with the organism itself. It is the experience of perceptual feedback consequent on one’s actions that is responsible for the intuition of causality (Freeman, 1990). However, it must not be supposed that the cause or consciousness is secreted from some definite location in the brain, it is distributed and delocalized throughout the system (c.f. Freeman, 1990). Freedom in the present context means being true to `self’, in other words, being coherent. A free act is a coherent act. Of course not all acts are free, as one is seldom fully coherent. Yet the mere possiblity of being unfree affirms the opposite, that freedom is real, “. . . we are free when our acts spring from our whole personality, when they express it, when they have that indefinable resemblance to it which one sometimes finds between the artist and his work.”[14]

The coherent `self’ is distributed and nonlocal — being implicated in a community of other entities with which one is entangled (Whitehead, 1925; see also Ho, 1993). Thus, being true to self does not imply acting against others. On the contrary, sustaining others sustains the self, so being true to others is also being true to self. It is only within a mechanistic Darwinian perspective that freedom becomes perverted into acts against others (see Ho, 1996e). The coherent `self’ can also couple coherently to the environment so that one becomes as much in control of the environment as one is responsive. The organism thereby participates in creating its own possible futures as well as those of the entire community of organisms in the universe, much as Whitehead (1925) has envisaged. I venture to suggest, therefore, that a truly free individual is a coherent being that lives life fully and spontaneously, without fragmentation or hesitation, who is at peace with herself and at ease with the universe as she participates in creating, from moment to moment, its possible futures.

Acknowledgments

An earlier draft of this paper was written for the occasion of the 6th Mind & Brain Conference, and I am grateful to Brian Goodwin and Peter Fenwick for making it happen. Afterwards, I felt so inspired by the discussions with the participants that I decided to write it up for publication. Thanks are also due to Geoffrey Sewell for stimulating discussions on coherence and bioenergetics and for keeping track of my physics; to Peter Saunders, Brian Goodwin, Michael Brown and Michael Clarke for their encouragement and support, and for drawing my attention to crucial publications and preprints. Invaluable suggestions for improving the manuscript came from the reviewers, Walter Freeman and Joseph Goguen.

Notes

1. The Theoretical Biology Club was an informal association of academics based in Cambridge University in the 1930s. Its membership was probably more extensive than I have indicated (see Mackay, 1994). Their project continued, to some extent, in a series of meetings organized by C.H. Waddington in the 1960s and 70s. The proceedings, published under the title,Towards a Theoretical Biology (Edinburgh University Press) were very influential among critics of mainstream neo-Darwinian theory of evolution, including myself. Four recent Waddington Memorial Conferences have been organized by Waddington’s student, Brian Goodwin, and published as collected volumes (see Goodwin and Saunders, 1989; Stein and Varela, 1992). These helped to keep the project of the Theoretical Biology Club alive, and I count myself among the intellectual beneficiaries.
2. Cited in Ehrenber, 1967, p103.
3. Schr?dinger, 1944, pp.70-71.
4. Schr?dinger was criticized by both Pauling and Perutz over his non-rigorous use of “negative entropy”. The exchanges are described by Gnaiger, 1994.
5. I explore the consequences of organic space-time for understanding some of the more paradoxical “states of consciousness” in my book (Ho, 1993) and also in a forth-coming paper (Ho and Marcer, 1996).
6. The present conceptualization, based on thermodynamics, converges with the notion of autopoesis describing the living system as a unitary, self-producing entity, which Maturana and Varela (1987) derived from purely formal considerations.
7. Waddington’s ideas in evolutionary theory is reviewed recently by Ho, 1996b.
8. This is comprehensively described by Goodwin (1995) in our Open University Third Level Course and accompanying video.
9. Elsewhere, it is argued that nonlocal intercommunication based on quantum coherence is involved in these simultaneous changes in brain activities (Ho and Marcer, 1996).
10. I have dealt with the socioeconomic implications as well as scientific issues of gene biotechnology and the Human Genome Project elsewhere Ho (1995c).
11. My colleagues and I have written against the reductionist tendencies of mainstream evolutionary theory since 1976, but see in particular, Ho and Saunders (1984); Pollard, J.W. (1984); Ho, M.W. (1986); Ho and Fox (1988). The issue of epigenetic, or Lamarckian inheritance has been thoroughly reviewed and documented recently by Jablonka and Lamb (1995). See also, Ho, M.W. (1996d).
12. Some aspects of brain activity can best be understood in terms of quantum coherence, independently of arguments given by Hameroff and Penrose (1995) who offer a specific mechanism for mediating coherence. The quantum coherence described in the present paper involves the whole system. When the system is coherent, nonlocal correlations can be established instantaneously, i.e., without delay. The large-scale spatial coherence of brain activities observed by Freeman and Barrie (1994) may be indicative of such instantaneous intercommunication. The relationship between quantum coherence, organic space-time and conscious experience is the subject of another paper (Ho and Marcer, 1996).
13. The coherent pure state (which is factorizable) is the prerequisite for instantaneous, lossless intercommunication, because the slightest change will give rise to a `signal’ passing between the uncorrelated factorizable parts. However, during intercommunication, factorizability is temporarily lost.
14. Bergson, 1916, p. 172.
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Legends
Figure 1. Energy flow, energy storage and the reproducing life-cycle.
Figure 2. The many-fold cycles of life coupled to energy flow.
Figure 3. The organism frees itself from the contraints of energy conservation and the second law of thermodynamics.

The Evolutionary Outrider. The Impact of the Human Agent on Evolution, Essays
in Honour of Ervin Laszlo (D. Loye, ed.), pp. 49-65, Praeger, 1998.

* Abstract
* Organism – the universal archetype
* The irrepressible tendency towards the whole
* Organic space-time versus mechanical space and time
* Organism versus mechanism
* A theory of the organism
* The thermodynamics of organized complexity
* The liquid crystalline organism
* Knowledge as intercommunication in a participatory universe
* The quantum holographic body field of the organism
* The coherence of brain and body consciousness
* Quantum coherence and brain consciousness
* The organism’s macroscopic wave function and universal entanglement

* Acknowledgments
* References
Abstract

The Jungian ideal of the whole person is one whose cell and psyche, body and mind, inner and outer, are fully integrated, and hence completely in tune with nature. Jung’s ideas on psychical development show many parallels to those relating to the organism. Similarly, Laszlo’s theory of the quantum holographic universe views the universe effectively as a kind of superorganism, constantly becoming, being created through the activities of its constituent organisms at every level. The organism is thus the most universal archetype. I describe a theory of the organism, based on quantum coherence, which is, in some respects, a microcosm of Laszlo’s universe. It involves key notions of the maximization of local autonomy and global cohesion, of universal participation, of sensitivity and responsiveness, which have profound implications for our global future.

* Parts of this paper was first delivered as a lecture in the Assisi Conference,”The Confluence of Matter and Spirit: Patterning in the Psyche and in Archetypal Fields”, Assisi, Aug. 11-17, 1996.

Organism – the universal archetype

In the Summer of 1991, I saw something in Mexico City which haunted me for months afterwards. It was a thick round slab of sculpted rock, about 3.25m in diameter. The official guide book says it depicts the Aztec moon goddess, embodying the powers of night, who was killed and gruesomely dismembered by her brother the sungod – an act so terrible that the world itself is torn asunder. Yet, the beautifully executed symmetries of the form evokes a sense of the dismembered parts drawing together again to make a whole, counteracting the violent severence of head and limbs. Mazatl Galindo, who teaches indigenous American cultures and is himself of Aztec Indian descent, has since explained to me that this sculpted disc, which has the same dimensions as the much better known, and widely reproduced calender stone, is actually also a calender: the thirteen main joints of her dismembered body representing the thirteen divisions of the year. The alternating disintegration and re-integration it evokes signifies the cycles of death and rebirth that mark the passage of time.

I came upon the sculpture while accompanying a group of university under-graduates travelling around the world on an intensive, year-long education programme on Global Ecology – Integrating Nature and Culture (of which I was a founding faculty member). In the course of the year and throughout the Third World, we had experienced the same distressing disintegration of the environment and indigenous communities brought on by industrial developments. And yet there remains, everywhere, an indestructible, irrepressible spirit to make things whole again. It was not just a survival instinct, but a genuine lust for life – the psychic energy that created the calender stone is at work, initiating the healing process even as disintegration is continuing apace. The meaning of that year’s journey and the journey of my life as symbolic of life itself came to me like an avalanche. I have died several deaths since my encounter with that symbol. I found myself standing at the gates of the underworld, as Orpheus must have done, torn between the fear of impending hell and the over-riding need to recover a lost love. Eventually, it transformed my life, in much the way that Jung (1964) has envisaged the transforming power of symbols. Love rules our lives on many planes. Scottish psychologist Ian Suttie (1924), a critic of Freud, proposed that love, as distinct from sex, is the primary drive for all social organisms. Love comes from the nurturing ministrations of the mother or caretaker during infancy. From this arises a feeling of tenderness that regards all people to be possible companions, to be enjoyed and loved, and from whom approval is sought. On another plane, the successful separation of child from mother creates a field of attraction, a “virtual space” of love which we fill with our social and creative activities.
(Winnicott, 1974).

Love is a desire for wholeness. It is a desire for resonance, for intimacy, a longing to embrace and complete a larger whole. And it is that which motivates our social and creative acts and our knowledge of nature on the most universal plane (Ho, 1994a). At its most personal, love is our affection for specific human beings, it is also one’s own process of individuation – of remaking one’s “self” out of the fabric of experiences, transcending the well-worn archetypes to become a unique whole person. The whole person is one whose sense of uniqueness is premissed on her relationship with all of nature. Thus, the personal and universal are inextricably intertwined. The most intimate knowledge of oneself is at the same time, the most profound knowledge of nature.

The true love of self is also inextricably the love of humanity and of all nature. That is why we feel obliged to serve, to help, to alleviate suffering and pain just as they were our own. Scientists like David Bohm, Ervin Laszlo and others are indeed trying to recover that lost love, the universal wholeness and entanglement that enables us to emphathize and to be compassionate.

The whole is never static, it is constantly dying and reborning, decaying and renewing, breaking down to build up again. The same cycles of disintegration and re-integration occur whether one is looking at the energy metabolism of our body or the stream of consciousness out of which we individuate our psyche. During the normal `steady state’ of our existence, the multitudes of infinitesimal deaths and rebirths are intricately balanced so that the old changes imperceptibly into the new. However, whenever the attracting centre of the new is radically different from the old, a larger, and at times, complete disintegration may be needed before the new can individuate. It is like the caterpillar which must completely dissolve so that the beautiful butterfly can emerge. That is our hope for the approaching millennium. The psyche has so much in common with the organism that many of the most perceptive biologists and psychologists have proposed a complete continuity and identity between the two. They were impressed with the `directiveness’ of all vital processes, whether developmental, physiological or psychical. In development, the fertilized egg goes through a series of morphogenetic changes directed towards producing the adult organism, and is remarkably resistant to disturbing influences. Similarly, the organism is able to maintain its internal physiology in a constant state despite large changes in the external environment. So it is with the purposiveness of all living things. One has only to try to stop a cat from doing what it wants to do. The mark of a living being is that it always has its own way of doing things, its own directed purpose in life that resists what is imposed on it. It is not at the mercy of its surroundings. It is so even for the simplest unicellular organism. The biologist Jennings (1933) took a lifetime to study the ciliate protozoa Paramecium, and became convinced of its purposiveness, it autonomy at the very least. For example, it will swim towards the light, or not, according as to whether it is hungry or fully fed.

Geneticist Sinnott (1950) argues in his book, Cell and Psyche, that biological organization, concerned with development and physiology, and psychical activity, concerned with behaviour and leading to mind, are fundamentally the same thing. “In some unexplained fashion, there seems to reside in every living thing,…an inner subjective relation to its bodily organization. This has finally evolved into what is called consciousness…through this same inner relationship, the mechanisms which guides and controls vital activities towards specific ends, the pattern or tension set up in protoplasm, which so sensitively regulates its growth and behaviour, can also be experienced, and this is the genesis of desire, purpose, and all other mental activities.” (p.48)

To me, the Jungian ideal of the whole person is also one whose cell and psyche, body and mind, inner and outer, are fully integrated, and hence completely in tune with nature. That may be the secret of the golden flower (see Fordham, 1966), the immortal spirit-body created out of the resolution of opposites, the intertwining of darkness and light (moon goddess and sungod) that is the essence of life itself. The encounter with the Aztec calender stone is the immediate prelude to my work towards a theory of the organism, much of which is in The Rainbow and The Worm written almost a year later (Ho, 1993). A recent summary of the main thesis with additional work done since is presented elsewhere (Ho, 1997a)

Jung’s ideas on psychical development show many parallels to those relating to living organization, and have since been borrowed back into biology. `Individuation’, for example, has been used by the embryologist/ geneticist Waddington (1956) to describe the process of forming a whole, or a whole organ, such as a limb from the global morphogenetic field. Jung himself was not unaware of these parallels when he presented the psyche as a dynamic, self-regulating system, motivated by psychic energy or libido, a general sense of desire or longing, an urge that flows between opposite poles, so that the stronger the opposition the greater the tension (Fordham, 1966). The allusion to the living system and energy flow is unmistakable. Jung’s theory of the psyche, drawn largely from his own experiences and imagination, is also a theory of the organism. The organism is the most universal archetype. Similarly, Laszlo’s (1995, 1996) theory of the quantum holographic universe views the universe effectively as a kind of superorganism, constantly becoming, being created through the activities of its constituent organisms at every level. These activities leave traces (quantum interferences) in the universal vacuum field which feed back on the future evolution of the organisms themselves. The universal quantum holographic field is the collective consciousness (including the unconscious) of all organisms. My theory of the organism is in some respects, a microcosm of Laszlo’s universe.

The irrepressible tendency towards the whole

What is it to be an organism? It is, at bottom, the irrepressible tendency towards being whole. It is that which underlies both the directiveness of vital activities, and the love we express on many planes. In biological development, the most characteristic feature of the embryo is not so much its directiveness towards producing an adult organism or any archetype, rather it is its tendency to maintain and develop into an organized whole, however it is disturbed. Sometimes, this organized whole is so altered that it is no longer recognizable as the same organism, but it is nonetheless an organism in the sense of being an organized whole.

More significantly, there is a special relationship between part and whole in the organism.The egg starts to develop by cell division. At a sufficiently early stage, the cells in the embryo are typically totipotent, in that they have the potential to develop into any part of the whole. When they are separated, each cell can develop into a whole organism, albeit a much smaller one than the original. Similarly, if a part of the early embryo is removed, that part can be regenerated from the remaining so that the whole is again recovered. Regeneration can also occur in adult organisms of some species such as the salamander. It is part and parcel of the healing process that enables all organisms to recover from illnesses and injuries. Whole and part are therefore mutually implicated in the organism. This quality of organic wholeness has eluded mechanistic science right from the beginning, and has been the main sticking point of the debate between the mechanists and their opponents, the vitalists.

Organic space-time versus mechanical space and time

The mechanistic framework broke down at the turn of the present century, giving way to quantum theory at the very small scale of elementary particles and to general relativity at the large scales of planetary motion. In place of the static, eternal universe of absolute space and time, there is a multitude of contingent, observer-dependent space-time frames. Instead of solid objects with simple locations in space and time, one finds delocalized, mutually entangled quantum entities evolving like organisms. The opposition between the mechanistic and the organic worldview hinges on the fundamental nature of space and time.

Mechanical space and time are both linear, homogeneous, separate and local. In other words, both are infinitely divisible, and every bit of space or of time is the same as every other bit. A billiard ball here cannot affect another one there, unless someone pushes the one here to collide with the one there. Mechanical space-time also happens to be the space and time of the commonest “common-sensible” world in our mundane, everyday existence. It is the space-time of frozen instantaneity abstracted from the fullness of real process, rather like a still frame taken from a bad movie-film, which is itself a flat simulation of life. The passage of time is an accident, having no connection with the change in the configuration of solid matter located in space. Thus, space and time are merely coordinates for locating objects. One can go forwards or backwards in time to locate the precise objects at those particular points. In reality, we know that we can as much retrace our space-time to locate the person that was 30 or 50 years younger as we can undo the wrongs we have committed then. There is no simple location in space and time (Whitehead, 1925).

Psychoanalyst-artist Marion Milner (1957) describes her experience of “not being able to paint” as the fear of losing control, of no longer seeing the mechanical common-sensible separateness of things. It is really a fear of being alive, of entanglement and process in the organic reality that ever eludes mechanistic descripion. And yet, it is in overcoming the imposed illusion of the separateness of things that the artist/scientist enters into the realm of creativity and real understanding – which is the realm of organic space-time. Mechanical physics has banished organic space-time from our collective public consciousness, though it never ceases to flourish in the subterranean orphic universe of our collective unconscious and our subjective aesthetic experience. In a way, all developments in western science since Descartes and Newton may be seen as a struggle to reclaim our intuitive, indigenous notions of organic space-time, which, deep within our soul, we feel to be more consonant with authentic experience.

Organism versus mechanism

The mechanistic worldview indeed officially ended at the beginning of this century. But the profound implications of this decisive break with the intellectual tradition of previous centuries were recognized by a mere handful of visionaries, especially by the French philosopher Henri Bergson (1916), and the English mathematician-philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1925). Between them, they articulated an organicist philosophy in place of the mechanistic. Let me summarize some of what I see to be the major contrasts between the mechanical universe and the universe of organisms.

Mechanical Universe – Organic Universe
Static, deterministic Dynamic, evolving
Separate, absolute space and absolute time for all observers space-time
inseperable, contingent observer(process)-dependent space-time frames
Inert objects with simple locations in space and time Delocalized organisms
with mutually entangled space-times
Linear, homogeneous space and time Nonlinear, heterogeneous, multi-
dimensional space-times
Local causation Non-local causation
Given, nonparticipatory and hence, impotent observer Creative,
participatory; entanglement of observer and observed

The contrasts are brought into sharper relief by considering the differences between mechanism and organism, or, more accurately, the opposition between a mechanical system and an organic system. First of all, a mechanical system is an object in space and time, whereas an organism is, in essence, of space-time. An organism creates its own space-times by its activities, so it has control over its space-time, which is not the same as external clock time. Secondly, a mechanical system has a stability that belongs to a closed equilibrium, depending on controllers, buffers and buttresses to return the system to set, or fixed points. It works like a non-democratic institution, by a hierarchy of control: a boss who sits in his office doing nothing (bosses are still predominantly male) except giving out orders to line managers, who in turn coerce the workers to do whatever needs to be done. An organism, by contrast, has a dynamic stability, which is attained in open systems far away from equilibrium. It has no bosses, no controllers and no set points. It is radically democratic, everyone participates in making decisions and in working by intercommunication and mutual responsiveness. Finally, a mechanical system is built of isolatable parts, each external and independent of all the others. An organism, however, is an irreducible whole, where part and whole, global and local are mutually implicated. An even more significant change in worldview is the dissolution of the Cartesian barrier separating the observer from the observed. In the quantum universe, observer and observed are mutually entangled, each act of observation determining the evolution of both. Knowledge, therefore, involves the full participation of the knower in the known. As the knower is an organism, she is also an actor who participates in constructing and shaping the universe, andshe does so knowingly. There is, thus, no escaping from the responsibility of a participatory universe and the moral imperative of one’s mutual entanglement, ultimately with all of nature. But let us begin with the central percept of being an organism.

A theory of the organism

There are 75 trillion cells in our body, made up of astronomical numbers of molecules of many different kinds. How can this huge conglomerate of disparate cells and molecules function so perfectly as a coherent whole? How can we summon energy at will to do whatever we want? And most of all, how is it possible for there to be a singular “I” that we all feel ourselves to be amid this diverse multiplicity?

To give an idea of the coordination of activities involved, imagine an immensely huge superorchestra playing with instruments spanning an incredible spectrum of sizes from a piccolo of 10-9 metre up to a bassoon or a bass viol of a metre or more, and a musical range of seventy-two octaves. The amazing thing about this superorchestra is that it never ceases to play out our individual songlines, with a certain recurring rhythm and beat, but in endless variations that never repeat exactly. Always, there is something new, something made up as it goes along. It can change key, change tempo, change tune perfectly, as it feels like it, or as the situation demands, spontaneously and without hesitation. Furthermore, each and every player, however small, can enjoy maximum freedom of expression, improvising from moment to moment, while maintaining in step and in tune with the whole. I have just described a theory of the quantum coherence that underlies the radical wholeness of the organism, which involves total participation, maximizing both local freedom and global cohesion. It involves the mutual implication of global and local, of part and whole, from moment to moment. It is on that basis that we can have a sense of ourselves as a singular being, despite the diverse multiplicity of parts. That is also how we can perceive the unity of the here and now, in an act of “prehensive unification”(Whitehead, 1925). Artists like scientists, depend on the same exquisite sense of prehensive unification, to see patterns that connect apparently disparate phenomena.
In order to add corroborative details to the theory, however, I shall give a more scientific narrative beginning with energy relationships.

The thermodynamics of organized complexity

Textbooks tell us that living systems are open systems dependent on energy flow. Energy flows in together with materials, and waste products are exported as well as the spent energy that goes to make up entropy. And that is how living systems can, in principle, escape from the second law of thermodynamics. The second law, as you may know, encapsulates the fact that all physical systems run down, ultimately decaying to homogeneous disorganization when all useful energy is spent, or converted into entropy. But how do living systems manage their antientropic existence? I have suggested (Ho, 1996a,b; 1997a) that the key to understanding how the organism overcomes the immediate constraints of thermodynamics is in its capacity to store the incoming energy, and in somehow closing the energy loop within to give a reproducing, regenerating life cycle. The energy, in effect, circulates among complex cascades of coupled cyclic processes within the system before it is allowed to dissipate to the outside. These cascades of cycles span the entire gamut of space-times from slow to fast, from local to global, that all together, constitutes the life-cycle. Each cycle is a domain of coherent energy storage – coherent energy is simply energy that can do work because it is all coming and going together, as opposed to incoherent energy which goes in all directions at once and cancel out, and is therefore, quite unable to do work.
Coupling between the cycles ensures that the energy is transferred directly from where it is captured or produced, to where it is used. In thermodynamic language, those activities going thermodynamically down-hill, and therefore yielding energy, are coupled to those that require energy and go thermodynamically uphill. This coupling also ensures that positive entropy generated in some space-time elements is compensated by negative entropy in other space-time elements. There is, in effect, an internal energy conservation as well as an internal entropy compensation. The whole system works by reciprocity, a cooperative give and take which balances out over the system as a whole, and within a sufficiently long time (Ho, 1997a). The result is that there is always coherent energy available in the system, which can be readily shared throughout the system, from local to global and vice versa, from global to local. That is why, in principle, we can have energy at will, whenever and wherever it is needed. The organism has succeeded in gathering all the necessary vital processes into a unity of coupled non-dissipative cycles spanning the entire gamut of space-times up to and including the life-cycle itself, which effectively feeds off the dissipative irreversible energy flow. In thermodynamic terms, the living system can be represented as a superposition of cyclic non-dissipative processes, for which entropy production balance out to zero, SDS = 0, and dissipative, irreversible processes, for which net entropy production is positive, SDS > 0.
But how can energy mobilization be so perfectly coordinated? That is a direct consequence of the energy stored, which makes the whole system excitable, or highly sensitive to specific weak signals. It does not have to be pushed and dragged into action like a mechanical system. Weak signals originating anywhere within or outside the system will propagate throughout the system and become automatically amplified by the energy stored, often into macroscopic action. Intercommunication can proceed very rapidly, especially because organisms are completely liquid crystalline.

The liquid crystalline organism

Several years ago, we discovered an optical technique that enables us to see living organisms in brilliant interference colours generated by the liquid crystallinity of their internal anatomy. We found that all live organisms are completely liquid crystalline – in their cells as well as the extracellular matrix, or connective tissues (see Ho et al, 1996; Ross et al, 1997). Liquid crystals are states of matter between solid crystals and liquids. Like solid crystals, they possess long-range orientation order, and often, also varying degrees of translational order (or order of motion). In contrast to solid crystals, however, they are mobile and flexible and highly responsive. They undergo rapid changes in orientation or phase transitions when exposed to weak electric (or magnetic) fields, to subtle changes in pressure, temperature, hydration, acidity or pH, concentrations of inorganic molecules or other small molecules. These properties happen to be ideal for making organisms, as they provide for the rapid intercommunication required for the organism to function as a coherent whole. (Images of live organisms taken from video-recordings may be found in Ho, 1997c)
This imaging technique enables us to literally see the whole organism at once, from its macroscopic activities down to the long-range order of the molecules that make up its tissues. The colours generated depend on the structure of the particular molecules – which differ for each tissue – and their degree of coherent order (see Ross et al, 1997 for the mathematical derivation showing how, for weakly birefringent material, the colour intensity is approximately linearly related to both intrinsic birefringence and the order parameter). The principle is exactly the same as that used in detecting mineral crystals in geology; but with the important difference that the living liquid crystals are dynamic through and through. The molecules are all moving about busily transforming energy and material in the meantime, and yet they still appear crystalline.
The reason is because visible light vibrates much faster than the molecules can move, so the tissues will appear indistinguishable from static crystals to the light transmitted, so long as the movements of the constituent molecules are sufficiently coherent. In fact, the most actively moving parts of the organism are always the brightest, implying that their molecules are moving all the more coherently. With our optical technique, therefore, one can see that the organism is thick with coherent activities at all levels, which are coordinated in a continuum from the macroscopic to the molecular. That is the essence of the organic whole, where local and global, part and whole are mutually implicated at any time and for all times.
Those images draw attention to the wholeness of the organism in another respect. All organisms – from protozoa to vertebrates without exception – are polarized along the anterior-posterior axis, or the oral-adoral axis, such that all the colours in the different tissues of the body are at a maximum when the axis is appropriately aligned in the optical system, and they change in concert as the axis is rotated from that position.

Knowledge as intercommunication in a participatory universe

The images demonstrate something profound about the nature of knowledge. Are the colours really in the organisms? Yes and no. They are dependent on the particular organism and its physiological state, but no colours would be produced unless we set up the observation in a certain way. Therefore, the observation, and hence the knowledge gained, is always dependent on both the observer and the observed. It is an act of intercommunication, which, in the ideal, is just like that between different parts of the organism (see below). The authenticity of the knowledge gained depends on this delicate balance of obtaining information while respecting the object of one’s interrogation. That is why one uses minimally invasive, nondestructive techniques for investigating living organization, which allows organisms to be organisms (Ho, 1993). Crude, destructive methods of interrogation will invariably yield misleading information of the most mechanistic kind, reinforcing a mechanistic view of organisms and of the universe.
In the same way, as we participate in universal wholeness, in Laszlo’s quantum holographic field, we do so with the requisite sensitivity and respect. Knowledge is always a gift one accepts with responsiveness and responsibility. Let us look at how intercommunication takes place within the organism.

The quantum holographic body field of the organism

There is no doubt that if we could look inside our bodies the same way we have done for the small creatures, we would see our living body as an incredibly colorful, liquid crystalline continuum, with all parts rapidly intercommunicating and colours flashing, so that it can act as a coherent whole. (That may be why we say we are off-colour when we don’t feel well.) One has been led to believe that intercommunication in large animals like ourselves depends on the nervous system controlled by the brain. However, that may be only half the story, as nerves do not reach all parts of the body, and animals without a nervous system nevertheless have no problems in acting as a coherent whole.
The clue to the other half of the story is in the connective tissues which make up the bulk of most animals including ourselves. These are the skin, the bones, cartilage, tendons, ligaments and other tissues that fill up the spaces between the usual organs. Most people still think that these tissues fulfill mechanical functions of protection and support, like packing material. However, we now know they are all liquid crystalline, and have much more exotic properties.
The connective tissues are further connected to the intracellular matrices of all individual cells which are also liquid crystalline. There is thus an excitable, liquid crystalline continuum for rapid intercommunication permeating the entire organism, enabling it to function as a coherent whole, as we have directly demonstrated with our noninvasive optical imaging technique. This continuum constitutes a “body consciousness” that precedes the nervous system in evolution (c.f. Oschman, 1984, 1993); and I suggest, it still works in tandem with, and to some extent, independently of the nervous system. This body consciousness is the pre-requisite for conscious experience that involves the participation of the intercommunicating whole. When the body is fully coherent, intercommunication is instantaneous and nonlocal. By nonlocal, I mean that distant sites, say my left hand and my right hand, take no time at all to reach agreement as to what to do next, so it is impossible to know where the “signal” originated. This is the quantum coherent state. The quantum coherent state is a very special state of being whole, which maximizes both local freedom and global cohesion (see Ho, 1993). This is due to the factorizability of the quantum coherent state (Glauber, 1970) in which the parts are so perfectly coordinated that the correlations between them resolves neatly into products of the self-correlations of the parts, so the parts behave as though they are independent of one another. Remember the huge superorchestra I mentioned earlier? Factorizability of the quantum coherent state explains why the body can be performing all sorts of different but coordinated functions simultaneously. As I am writing this paper, my metabolism is working in all the cells of my body, my trunk and leg muscles are keeping in tone so I don’t collapse into a heap, while the muscles in my arms and fingers are working together in just the right way to make the appropriate taps on the keyboard, and my eyes are tracking the words on the monitor screen; and hopefully, the nerve cells in my brain are firing coherently. All that is possible also because noiseless and instantaneous intercommunication can occur throughout the system when the system is coherent . In practice, quantum coherence occurs to different degrees, and factorizability is never perfect except in the ideal. Nevertheless, our body approaches that ideal, which also tends to be restored after decohering interactions (see Ho, 1997a,b).

The coherence of brain and body consciousness

From the perspective of the whole organism, the brain’s primary function may be to mediate coherent coupling of all subsystems, so the more highly differentiated or complex the system, the bigger the brain required. Substantial parts of the brain are indeed involved in integrating inputs from all over the body, and over long time scales. But not all the coordination required is provided by the brain, for this coordination seems instantaneous by all accounts.
Thus, during an olfactory experience, slow oscillations in the olfactory bulb (in the brain) are in phase with the movement of the lungs (Freeman and Barrie, 1994). Similarly, the coordinated movement of the four limbs (or all the hundreds of limbs in the millipede) in locomotion is accompanied by patterns of activity in the motor centers of the brain which are in phase with those of the limbs (Collins and Stewart, 1992; Kelso, 1991). That is a remarkable achievement which physiologists and neuroscientists alike have taken too much for granted. The reason macroscopic organs such as the four limbs can be coordinated is that each is individually a coherent whole, so that a definite phase relationship can be maintained among them. The hand-eye coordination required for the accomplished pianist is extremely impressive, but depends on the same inherent coherence of the subsystems which, I suggest, enables instantaneous intercommunication to occur. There simply isn’t time enough, from one musical phrase to the next, for inputs to be sent to the brain, there to be integrated, and coordinated outputs to be sent back to the hands (see Hebb, 1958).
I raised the posssibility that a “body consciousness” works in tandem with the “brain consciousness”of the nervous system. I suggest that instantaneous coordination of body functions is mediated, not so much by the nervous system, but by the body consciousness inhering in the liquid crystalline continuum of the body. (The nervous system is also liquid crystalline, however, the known activities of the nervous system are not based directly on their liquid crystalline properties.) Ho and Knight (1997) following Oschman (1984, 1993), review evidence suggesting that this liquid crystalline continuum is responsible for the direct current (DC) electric field permeating the entire body of all animals, that Becker (1990) and others have detected. Furthermore, this liquid crystalline continuum possess all the properties required for a body consciousness that can register tissue memory of previous experiences.
Becker (1990) has demonstrated that the DC field has a mode of semi-conduction that is much faster than nervous conduction. During a perceptive event, local changes in the DC field can be measured half a second before sensory signals arrive in the brain, suggesting that the activities in the brain may be pre-conditioned by the local body field. Becker located the DC body field to “perineural” tissues such as the glial cells. But we believe it is located in the liquid crystalline continuum of the connective tissues (Ho and Knight, 1997).
Up to 70% of the proteins in the connective tissues consist of collagens that exhibit constant patterns of alignment, as characteristic of liquid crystals (Knight and Feng, 1993). Collagens have distinctive mechanical and dielectric properties that make them very sensitive to mechanical pressures, changes in pH, inorganic ions and electromagnetic fields. In particular, a cylinder of water surrounds the collagen molecule, giving rise to an ordered array of bound water on the surface of the collagen network that supports rapid “jump conduction” of protons, or positive electric charges. Proteins in liquid crystals have coherent motions, and will readily transmit weak signals by proton conduction, or as coherent electric waves. Thus, extremely weak electromagnetic signals or mechanical disturbances will be sufficient to set off a flow of protons that will propagate throughout the body, making it ideal for intercommunication.
The liquid crystalline nature of the continuum also enables it to function as a distributed memory store. The water bound on the surfaces of proteins are known to be altered when the proteins change their shape. Proteins undergo a hierarchy of shape changes over a range of time scales and of different energies. The shapes are clustered in groups that have nearly the same energies, with very low energetic barriers between them. Thus, global shape changes in a liquid crystalline network can easily be triggered, that will, in turn, alter the structure of bound water. As the bound water forms a global network in association with the collagen, it will have a certain degree of stability, or resistance to change. By the same token, it will also retain tissue memory of previous experiences. Additional chemical modifications of the collagen network may also contribute to this memory. The memory may consist partly of dynamic circuits, the sum total of which constituting the DC body field.
A yet more interesting possibility is that the liquid crystalline continuum may function as a quantum holographic medium, recording the interference patterns arising from interactions between local activities and a globally coherent field. This is exactly analogous to Laszlo’s (1995) suggestion that the “zero-point field” of the universe functions as a universal holographic medium, recording the experiences of all the particles, each of which is subject to influences from the rest of the universe as well as feedback from the particle’s own activities on the universal medium. If the organism is coherent as I have suggested, then the conditions are there for a quantum holographic memory store in the liquid crystalline continuum of the body itself. Holographic memory is unique in that it is distributed globally, and yet, can be accessed and recovered locally. It captures an aspect of the organic whole in developmental biology that has completely eluded mechanistic understanding. It is that which can give rise to the subjective self, or psyche, that guides and regulates all vital activities towards a specific end. It is possible that biological development is based on the same holographic memory so that the entire organism can be engendered locally in a germ cell, from which the organism is, in turn, recoverable. Thus, consciousness is distributed throughout the entire body; “brain consciousness”, associated with the nervous system, being embedded in “body consciousness”. Brain and body consciousness mutually inform and condition each other. The singularity of purpose of the individual is based on a complete coherence of brain and body. The implications for holistic and psychic health are clear. A stressful situation will affect body consciousness through subtle ways in which mechanical pressures build up in the body to block intercommunication. That acts on the nervous system to give a diminished self-image of the body, which feeds back on the body in a vicious cycle that further undermines the individual’s physical well-being. By contrast, a supple body is a responsive body that moves and responds with the greatest of ease. It leads to a buoyant self-image that again feeds back to further enhance all bodily functions.

Quantum coherence and brain consciousness

Many recent studies of brain activities are revealing impressive largescale spatiotemporal coherence that suggest the brain also functions with a high degree of quantum coherence (see Ho 1997b and references therein). These come from measurements carried out with the ultrasensitive, noninvasive SQUID magnetometer, also referred to as magnetoencephalography (MEG) (see Iaonnides, 1994) as well as conventional electroencehalography (EEG) (Gray et al, 1989; Singer, 1995; Freeman and Barrie, 1994). Multichannel MEG, in particular, provides high speed, high resolution information of spatiotemporal coherence in brain activities. Studies conducted over the past 5 years have revealed 40 Hz activities that are coherent at both deep and superficial layers of the brain. Similarly, Freeman (1995) and his coworkers, recording simultaneously with an array of 64 electrodes from the rabbit cortex, found oscillations that are coherent over the entire array, for which no obvious “sources” could be identified.
Computer scientist, Marcer (1992; 1995), proposes a quantum holographic model of consciousness in which perception involves the conversion of an interference pattern (presumably between a coherent wave-field generated by the perceiver and the wave-field reflected off the perceived) to an object image that is coincident with the object itself. This is accomplished by a process known as phase conjugation, whereby the wave reflected from the object is returned (by the perceiver) along its path to form an image where the object is situated. In the act of perceiving, the organism also perceives itself situated in the environment, and through active phase conjugation directed throughout its body, forms an image of the self coincident with the organism itself, so “self” and “other” are simul-taneously defined (Ho, 1997b). What is the source of the coherent wave-field generated by the perceiver? Could it be the body field itself? Or the body field as modulated by the nervous system? This could be subject to empirical investigation. In the same way that body consciousness associated with the liquid crystalline continuum registers memory of its experience, brain consciousness registers memory of sensory images. The idea that brain memory is distributed and holographic has been suggested by a number of neurobiologists over the past 40 years (see Ho, 1997b for more details and references). Holographic memory storage is orders of magnitude more efficient than any model that make s use of “representations” because holographic memory employs actual physical simulations of processes (Marcer, 1992, 1995) and do not require lengthy sequences of arbitrary coding and decoding of isolated bits. Marcer suggests that the brain stores experienced holographic spatio-temporal patterns and compares stored with new patterns directly, recognition and learning being reinforced in “adaptive resonance”, thus also making for much faster processing.
As mentioned before, the liquid crystalline continuum supporting the body field may also take part in memory storage, although this possibility has never been seriously considered. Laszlo (1995) goes even further to suggest that much of memory may be stored in an ambient, collective holographic memory field delocalized from the individual; and that memories are only accessed by the brain from the ambient field. This ambient field may well be our collective unconscious. One can begin to see the organism with its own local quantum holographic field as a microcosm of the universal field in which it participates.

The organism’s macroscopic wave function and universal entanglement

If quantum coherence is characteristic of organism and psyche, as I have argued here, then the organism will possesss something like a macroscopic wave-function. This wave function is ever evolving, entangling its environment, transforming and creating itself anew. There is no “collapse of the wave function” as required by conventional quantum theory (cf Bohm and Hiley, 1993; see also Ho, 1993, 1997b). When quantum systems interact, they become mutually entangled, and there may be no resolution of their respective wave functions afterwards. So one may remain entangled and indeed, delocalized over past experiences (i.e., in Laszlo’s ambient field). Some interactions may have time scales that are extremely long, so that the wave function of interacting parties may take a correspondingly long time to become resolved, and largescale nonlocal connectivity may be maintained, possibly accounting for synchronicities, as Laszlo (1995) suggests. The “whole” organism is thus a domain of coherent activities, constituting an autonomous, free entity (see Ho, 1996a), not because it is separate and isolated from its environment, but precisely by virtue of its unique entanglement of other organisms in its environment. In this way, one can see that organic wholes are nested as well as entangled individualities. Each can be part of a larger whole, depending on the extent over which coherence can be established. So, when many individuals in a society have a certain rapport with one another, they may constitute a coherent whole, and ideas and feelings can indeed spread like wildfire within that community. In the same way, an ecological community, and by extension, the global ecology may also be envisaged as a super-organism within which coherence can be established in ecological relationships over global, geological space-times (see Ho, 1993, 1997d). What of the global community of human beings who can potentially intercommunicate in a matter of seconds, given the marvels of informational technology? Could they also be envisaged as a super-organism? There is an important debate going on in the global arena concerning “globalization” – the idea that the greater part of our life is determined by global processes in which national or local cultures, economies and borders are dissolving. While some are questioning the reality of globalization (eg, Hirst and Thompson, 1996), others see the globalized economy as the greatest threat to the survival of the global community (Korten, 1995). The problem with the globalized economy under the current terms is that it does not respect the autonomy of individual persons, local communities or nation states, nor does it enable universal participation of all the parties concerned. Local autonomy and universal participation are some of the pre-requisites for a coherent, sustainable global society (see Ho, 1996c, 1997c), in which the players must also be sensitive and responsive, or responsible and accountable. Instead, “unaccountable corporate powers” (Korten, 1997) effectively rule the world, depleting the earth’s natural resources with impunity, degrading the environment and creating poverty on a massive scale. The challenge of globalization is, indeed, to create a fully participatory global society, served by an appropriate global economy, that maximizes both local autonomy and global cohesion, as consistent with the quantum coherence of a truly organic system.

Acknowledgments
I thank Ervin Laszlo, Walter Freeman and David Korten for stimulating discussions and for relevant reprints.

Reprinted here with permission from the author, the following is mirrored from http://www.i-sis.org/organis.htm