A science of Life

Recently, professor Antonio Damasio has offered the international audience of science readers an excellent example of a journalist of biological sciences by publishing his book “Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, Putnam, 1994”.

In that clear to understand and scientifically suggestive presentation he states a few factual considerations aside of his innovative explanations upon the mysteries of human brain. He openly suggests that no global comprehension of the human brain could ever be achieved under an ideological separation of matter from spirit in the investigation of the system-process structure linking within a continuum of exchanges the most intimate micro-phenomena from the external flows of energy; may their source derive from other living structures or from ones of a different nature.

Namely the only primordial source of energy ensures science that every present system is the result of a continuous process establishing that the existing high status of order observable in today’s Nature took its start from an original, undifferentiated chaos.

Global Energy has always been the same, its order grew constantly, against any thermodynamic principle, and our miserable, scientific ‘reductionism’ is the only way we have to organize the road towards upper levels of understanding; if our disciplines don’t exclude, by means of an a-priori, para-theological and non-scientific ‘veto’, the physical from the meta-physical analyses of Nature.

The growing organization of order is the non-positivist evidence that a sphere of knowledge exists where thermodynamics can be perceived as a true science ruled by ‘laws’; not by mere ‘principles’.

Professor Damasio, with his study of Man, the best tool adequate to investigate the deep links supporting the holistic macro-understanding of ‘Life’ into a hierarchy of structures and systems from the most micro-physical, to the most macro-social ones.

Life is a continuum of energy-exchanges linking each personal intimately perceived wellness to the wider social and religious behaviors into a pseudo-stabile system where the observable, growing order is ensured by an innate endowement of micro-elements acting upon steadily differentiated, hierarchical sub-systems.

Communication of the unitary physical energy takes place according to patterns drown by communication of organized, balanced and appropriate information tailored to fit the specific requirements of each evolving sub-system.

This field of investigation shall ensure holism to reductionist disciplines in reaching a global comprehension of ‘life’ well beyond its human capacity of individual perception.

This is the reason why I find the approach illustrated by professor Damasio of an outstanding stature suited to integrate the overall structure of his studies by adding a super-ordered sub-system whose fundamental role is to organize the ‘energy exchanges’ between the well known engines converting the primordial source into the electrical, chemical, etc. packets existing within the human body.

Part of that disorganized energy is converted by the unknown subsystem into ‘thought waves’ capable of justifying the still para-scientific phenomena described as para-normal miracles or religious behaviors.

Unless an additional subsystem pre-ordered to feed the human being is taken into account, even professor Damasio’s admirable paradigm would fail to give an understanding to such deep ‘beliefs’ as the ‘collective psyche’, ‘transcendence’ or the social solidarity nourishing self-dedication and sacrifice beyond their occasional emergence as symptoms of a presumed mental disease.

Life – this is the keyword – arose in a perfect continuity from the previous energy source and its peculiarity is to create additional order – shrink entropy – along the flow of time.

This applies for sure to human thought and growth but it pre-existed human life and for sure will not terminate with it.

The ‘fact’ that energy-ordering is a Natural feature pervading every micro-structure of this Universe, compels us us to presume in our design of the organization of life into a tentative block-system, to at least suggest the system of ‘life exchangers’ whose role is entitling the energy converter structures to continue their role of energy or communication suppliers.

We are composed by a complex system of sub-systems down to the tiniest micro-physical elements in a steadily, organized exchanges between them (the internal) and with outer phenomena and other living beings.

The process of ‘life’ consists in converting elements of matter and of energy into additional order until ‘something’ happens blocking the flow and giving start to a process of constant degradation reducing the admirable, physical sub-systems into cinders.

Where is the sub-system of ‘life’ whose role has suddenly changed – not ‘stopped’ – from that of feeding energy to the previous sub-systems and has (presumably) assumed a different, individual set-up always integrated with the primordial system of life that gives order to the global energy field?

It seems reasonable and ‘scientific’ to give space to the powerful and sometimes perceivable meta-physical investigations by adding – as an individual sort of super-posed ‘hat’ – a sub-system of ‘life structures’ whose we could gradually attribute the function of managing all those ‘mysterious’ transcendent phenomena classified as para-gnosis, para-psychology, collective behaviors, metempsychosis, miracles etc. without the need to call into play the – even more ‘mysterious’ – positivist explanations offered by the ‘statistically unlike’ arrive of stochastic, alien micro-events of cosmic-rays, mutations or any other of the many events produced by the artistic creativeness of the socalled materialism of the reductionist, ‘positivist’ science.