This work aims to provide a theoretical approach for a truly
consistent description of living phase of matter, able to tackle both
reducible, microscopic issues (such as biochemistry and biophysical processes)
and analogical aspects like memory, adaptation, semantics, behaviour. Despite
the successes earned in cataloguing and finding the role of the most of
molecular components in living matter, the “biochemical and molecular
perspective”, popular in biology, medicine, and genetics, is unable to give
account for crucial topics as the faculty of living systems to “feel”, to “perceive”
what a given stimulus implies (means, indeed) for their survival. Condensed
matter physics too, if bounded to a local, short-range, and perturbative
approach, fails dramatically. This is also due to the role commonly assigned to
water – actually the main constituent of living matter – deemed for long time
to be merely chemical (as “solvent” or a reactant/product). Nonetheless, today
many evidences show how living matter can be right conceived as a
super-structured coherent water-based matrix, suggesting that the
characterization of bio(electro)chemical and physical processes undertaken at
molecular level in living matter, would let us unable to answer a question like
this: what allows an amoeba, moreover without any neurons, to “know” to get
closer to a nutrient or escape away from a toxin? I propose that to pursue such
a fundamental inquiry it’s necessary an essentially relational approach, that
is: to consider the living being at its grounding as the outcome of a physical
history of relationships where symmetry-breakings, dissipation and coherence
yield the emergence of the living state of matter, conceivable only as a
time-dependent open process, and not as a portraited “body”. The effective
tools to build up such an approach may be retrieved in far-form-equilibrium
thermodynamics (TD), symmetry-breakings and gauge-fields theory, science of
complexity, all the above within the framework of an advanced Quantum Field
Theory.
Indeed, within a field-view of matter, and of
water especially, as it has been developed by a Quantum Electrodynamic (QED)
description of condensed matter, it’s possible to give account for a physical
basis too such an epistemologically elusive, though crucial, feature of living
systems (i.e.: perception and meaning). The emerging landscape allows some
important meditations about adaptation, evolution, ecodynamics, and about
different conceptions of complexity and “information” in living realm.
Furthermore, some neuroscientific themes like consciousness, qualia and their
links to artificial intelligence could be supplied with due insights.
