From: weemba@sagi.wistar.upenn.edu (Matthew P Wiener)
Newsgroups: talk.origins
Subject: Pumped phonon condensates
Date: 3 Sep 92 14:13:21 GMT
Reply-To: weemba@sagi.wistar.upenn.edu (Matthew P Wiener)
Organization: The Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology

Whoever was calling me an idiot for jargondropping should speak up
now, but I'll beat you to it: I am an idiot, I am an idiot, etc.  I
remembered that it was not this newsgroup where I had expounded on
them before.

Now that I got that out of the way, let me repost a previous article
on pumped phonon condensates (PPCs) and add on possible evolutionary
scenarios for consciousness.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
In 1968, H Froehlich proposed a model for the efficient biological
conversion of randomly supplied energy into something more useful.
The random energy is modelled as a heat bath, called the pump.  The
system consists of a very large family of oscillators which can
exchange energy with each other, and with the pump.  If the pump
surpasses a certain critical threshold, the following occurs: the
discrete energy exchanges (these quanta are called phonons) take
place in a very specialized manner.  Instead of the usual Planck
distribution, that of a Bose-Einstein condensation takes place.
Meaning what?  Meaning that instead of being spread around a certain
value based on the heat bath's temperature, the phonons all accumulate
in the minimal state.

Why is this special?  Let's see: a boson is a spin 0,1,2,...
particle, as distinguished from a fermion which is a spin 1/2,
3/2, ... particle.  The Pauli exclusion principle applies to
fermions, and prevents any two from being in the same state.
Because of this, electrons build up in shells and we have
atoms and chemistry.  In contrast, bosons can and do bunch up
in the same state.  If there were no heat, a family of bosons
would collapse into the ground state.  But normal heat keeps
the bosons bouncing around at higher states.  The exact relation
between how many bosons are in a given energy level and the
ambient temperature is called the Planck distribution.

But if the temperature drops enough, the gas condenses, and
essentially all the bosons are in the exact same ground state,
and hence this quantum state is now macroscopic.  Amazing things
are possible--"friction", for example, is gone.  The best known
examples of this are superfluidity and superconductivity.

But according to Froehlich, the physics permits a room temperature
condensation when there is a pump and the bosons can exchange energy
with each other.  (For all I know, a Froehlich model will explain
high-temperature superconductivity.)  He developed his model in
analogy with a different boson condensation from a pump: lasers.

Froehlich has, over the years, proposed that various biological
oscillations would be suitable for such an analysis.  In his 1983
IJQC paper, he summarizes three of them.  Direct mechanical
vibrations, say of membranes, dipole vibrations, as in neurons,
and periodic enzymatic reactions.  In all cases, a condensate
allows for global synchronization, perhaps of chemical reaction,
cell growth, or morphogenesis.  Experimental evidence of various
sorts exists for Froehlich's general model.  The most interesting
seems to be the triggering of yeast growth with certain narrowly
defined low intensity infrared radiation.

Recently, I N Marshall has joined the small crowd of pumped phonon
condensate modellers.  What distinguished him was that he went for
psychological applications.  He takes the view that the nice global
unity of the condensate makes a nice metaphor for the well known
global properties of consciousness: we are able to perceive not
just notes, but a melody.  Memory seems to be holographic.  He
argues that our brain must operate in a non-local sort of manner,
if we can consistently identify concepts that are encoded away
from each other.

Marshall mentions that others have developed PDP non-local models,
he goes his own way, following Froehlich.  Marshall's proposal is
no more than a pretheory--he does not say how the condensate will
achieve any consciousness.  But even so, his pretheory should, at
some future date, be directly testable.  Candidate oscillators will
have to be identified, and detailed theoretical calculations should
yield predictions of the critical energy pump threshhold.  The effect
of various anesthesias on the oscillators will then give a particular
prediction as to when unconsciousness is achieved.

Other possibilities come to my mind for testing via hallucinogens.
How do they work?  Could it be they block a percentage of the
oscillators, and turn the large N statistical limit into a medium
N non-limit with a different phase transition structure?  Again,
this could be worked out theoretically and tested.

H Froehlich INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF QUANTUM CHEMISTRY 2,p641 (1968)
H Froehlich INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF QUANTUM CHEMISTRY 23,p1589 (1983)
I N Marshall NEW IDEAS IN PSYCHOLOGY 7,p73 (1989)
G L Sewell QUANTUM THEORY OF COLLECTIVE PHENOMENA, Section 7.4 (1986)
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Evolutionary speaking, this would be a classic example of preadaption,
or exaptation is SJG calls it.  The PPC is, according to Froehlich, an
unavoidable component of all large enough biological systems.  Life
would evolve to exploit its unique properties, for example, as a buffer
against thermal and other noise.  One of the most intriguing of his
many suggestions is that this could be happening not just with simple
dipole oscillators (ie, a wagging molecule that's + on one end and -
on the other) but oscillations between states of the innumerable
dynamical systems in the neural networks of our brain.  Consciousness
itself then arose as a PPC-synthesis of network computations.
-- 
-Matthew P Wiener (weemba@sagi.wistar.upenn.edu)