The Emergence of I

Abstract

What are the implications of the recent advances in physics and systems and information theories for our concepts concerning life? They are, as we shall see, enormous. Although the implications are clear, however, the final impact upon biology is still to be felt, for the biological sciences are just now beginning to apply the theories emanating from the momentous changes that have occurred in related fields. While physicists have become increasingly concerned with the role of the human mind in defining all physical events in a relative world of process, biologists have until recently tended to be even more involved in the reductionistic approach to life and have concentrated on determining our place in the mechanical world of form and function. During the twentieth century, physicists have focused on relationships within systems and among systems, defining the human mind as an integral aspect of those relationships. “It is,” says Harold J. Morowitz, “as if the two discplines were on fast-moving trains, going in opposite directions and not noticing what is happening across the tracks” [27:p. 34].

It is the same elements that go to compose my mind and the world. This situation is the same for every mind and its world, in spite of the unfathomable abundance of “cross-references” between them. The world is given to me only once, not one existing and one perceived. Subject and object are only one. The barrier between them cannot be said to have broken down as a result of recent experience in the physical sciences, for this barrier does not exist. [32:p. 137]

Erwin Schrödinger, 1956

Even without going beyond them (the bounds of scientific inquiry) one can say that, just as the Greek temple is more than an aggregation of stones, so each of us human beings is more than an aggregation of molecules. This is no less true of the eagle that rides the wind, the fish that darts through the pondweed, the butterfly that waves its patterned wings, or the crocus that spreads its petals to the sun. Matter, as it builds up from less to more, acquires form, and form represents the order that arises out of the original chaos. [20:p. 109]

Louis J. Halle, 1977