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Mailing List complex-science@necsi.org Message #9650 | |
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| It seems that "interactions" and "correlations" are two of the most widely used terms in all intellectual discourses, ranging from physics, to chemistry, to biology, to computer science, to mathematics, and beyond. I have reasons to believe that "correlations" is more general than and subsumes "interactions". It is clear that correlations can be quantitated using the Shannon's entropy formula. The purpose of this post is twofold -- i) define two kinds of correlations, and ii) apply the result to support the conclusion that the two fundamental questions in biology, i.e., "What is life?" and "What is a gene?", are entangled in the sense that one question cannot be answered without taking into account the other, or that answering one automatically answers the other. Linguists divide their field into two branches depending on the methodologies employed -- i) the synchronic approach analyzing language uses going on here and now, and ii) the diachronic approach focusing on the historical development of languages. Likewise, we may divide "correlations" into two classes -- i) synchronic correlations between two or more objects resulting from their physical interactions through space with speeds less than c, the speed of light, and ii) diachronic correlations between two or more objects resulting from their being derived from a common precursor state/object and thus appearing to interact instantly or with speeds faster than c. These two mechanisms of correlations are compared in Table 1. Table 1. A comparison between synchronic and diachronic correlations. __________________________________________________________________________ Correlations ________________________________________________________ Synchronic Diachronic __________________________________________________________________________ 1. Correlations Space Time in 2. Speed Less than c Faster than c (i.e., instantaneous) 3. Alternative "Physical interactions" "Entanglement" (?) names "Horizontal correlations" "Vertical correlations" "Relativistic "Non-relativistic interactions" interactions" 4. Examples All interactions in "Spooky action at a distance" physics and chemistry All evolved systems including organisms 5. Scientific Physics Evolutionary biology disciplines Chemistry Cosmology Reductionistic Holistic (molecular) biology (cell) biology Synchronic linguistics Diachronic linguistics Computer science Applied mathematics Pure mathematics (?) __________________________________________________________________________ The essential point of Table 1 is the logical assertion that correlations can be dichotomized based on the dichotomy of space and time. As examples of the dicharonic correlations, I cited the controversial topics of Einstein's "spooky action at a distance" or "entanglement", but I am not a theoretical physicist so I do not know if this inclusion will survive the test of a more rigorous mathematical-physics analysis. However I will assume that the identification of "diachronic correlations" with "entanglement" is reasonable for the purpose of this post. I was motivated to formulate the dual mechanisms of correlations proposed in Table 1 by my intuition this morning that the two questions, "What is life? and "What is a gene", may be entangled in the sense that one cannot be answered without taking into account the other, or that answering one automatically constrains the answer to the other in such a way as to make both answers together obey a common set of universal principles. This, of course, is reminiscent of the "spooky action at a distance" or entanglement in quantum physics. If the above conjecture is valid, several useful conclusions may be drawn on the basis of it: i) Biology divides into two branches -- reductionistic biology (RB) embodying physicochemical interactions in space whose speed is constrained by c, and holistic biology (HB) embodying correlations in the time dimension which can appear as spatial correlations/interactions at a transluminal speed. ii) HB cannot be reduced to RB, nor vice versa, just as a vertical axis cannot be reduced to a horizontal axis and vice versa in the 2-dimensional Euclidean space. iii) There exists a universal set of principles that constraints the correlations between HB and RB. One possible member of the postulated universal set of principles may be the information-energy complementarity (see Complementarism in my home page, under Publications). WE may summarize these ideas schematically as follows: Universal Principles (e.g., the principle of information-energy complementarity) ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ Reductionistic Holistic Biology Biology Figure 1. Reductionistic biology and holistic biology as the complementary manifestations of a set of universal principles. If Figure 1 is valid, it may enable us to infer that synchronic and diachronic correlations are the complementary aspects/manifestations of universal principles, just as waves and particles are the complementary aspects of quantum objects. With all the best. Sung _________________________________________ Sungchul Ji, Ph.D. Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology Rutgers University Piscataway, N.J. 08855 |
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