Introduction

The first half of the twentieth Century was filled with a stunning group of scientists, Einstein, Bohr, von Neumann and others. Alan Turing ranks near the top of this group. I am honored to contribute to this volume commemorating his work. How much do we owe one mind? His was a pivotal role in the cracking of the Nazi war code, which profoundly aided the defeat of Nazism. His invention of the Turing machine has revolutionized modern society, from universal Turing machines to all digital computers and the IT revolution. His model of morphogenesis, the first example of a ‘dissipative structure’, to use Prigogine's phrase, is one I have myself used as a developmental biologist.

I rightly praise Turing, but seek in this chapter to go beyond him. The core issue is the human mind. Two lines of thought, one stemming from Turing himself, the other from none other than Bertrand Russell, have led to a dominant view that the human mind arises as some kind of vast network of logic gates, or classical physicsconsciousness neurons', to use F. Crick's phrase in The Astonishing Hypothesis (Crick, 1994), connected in the 1011 neurons of the human brain.

I think this view could well be right, but is more likely to be wrong. My aim in this chapter is to sketch the lines of thought that lead to the standard view in computer science and much of neurobiology, and note some of the philosophic claims for and doubts about the claim; but most importantly I wish to explore the emerging behavior of open quantum systems in an environment, their new physics, and, centrally, our capacity to construct what I will call non-algorithmic, non-determinate yet non-random Trans-Turing Systems. As we shall see, Trans-Turing Systems are not determinate, for they inherit the indeterminism of their open quantum system aspects, yet they are non-random owing to their classical aspects. They are new to us and may move us decisively beyond the beauty, and limitations, of Turing's justly famous, but purely classical-physics, discrete-time and discrete-state machine.

Beyond the above, I shall make one truly radical proposal that I believe grows out of “sum over all possible histories” formulation of quantum mechanics (Feynman,1948).

My large aim in this chapter is to take us from our deeply received scientific world view and, derived from it, our view of the “real world” in which we live, that is, from the understanding of the world that was spawned by Newton and modern physics to an entirely different, newly vibrant, surprising, partially unknowable world of becoming in which the living, evolving world, biological, economic, and cultural co-creates, in an often unprestatable mystery, its own possibilities of becoming. If the latter perspective is right, we are beyond Newton, and even beyond Darwin, who, in all his brilliance, did not see that without natural selection “acting” at all to achieve it, the evolving biosphere creates its own future possibilities. And we will see, at the foundations of all this, that no laws entail the evolution of the biosphere, economy, or culture. But the biosphere is the most complex system we know in the universe. If it arose beyond entailing law, we must ask how this can be possible? More, is that “how” a hint to how complexity emerges at least in the living world, and perhaps in the abiotic universe?

We will begin to see ourselves in the living, evolving world in a world of inexplicable and unforeseeable opportunities that emerge with neither the “action” of natural selection in the evolving biosphere, or often without intent in the human world, that we partially co-create. It will follow that we live in not only a world of webs of cause and effect, but webs of opportunities that enable, but do not cause, often in unforeseeable ways, the possibilities of becoming of the biosphere, let alone human life. But, most importantly, I seek in this new world view a re-enchantment of humanity, of which this chapter may be a part. Our disenchantment following from Newton led to modernity.

In Dublin half a century ago, a major figure in this century's science visited, lectured, and foretold the future of a science which was not his own. The resulting book, What is Life?, is credited with having inspired some of the most brilliant minds ever to enter biology to the work which gave birth to molecular biology (Schrödinger 1967). Schrödinger's “little book” is, itself, as brilliant as warranted by its reputation. But, half a century later, and at the occasion of its honouring, perhaps we may dare to ask a new question: is the central thesis of the book right? I mean no dishonour to so superb a mind as Schrödinger's, nor to those properly inspired by him, to suggest that he may have been wrong, or at least incomplete. Rather, of course, like all scientists inspired by his ideas, I too seek to continue the quest.

I am hesitant even to raise the questions I shall raise, for I am also fully aware of how deeply embedded Schrödinger's own answers are in our view of life since Darwin and Weismann, and since the development of the theory of the germ plasma, with the gene as the necessary stable storage form of heritable variation: “Order from order,” answered Schrödinger. The large aperiodic solids and the microcode of which Schrödinger spoke have become the DNA and the genetic code of today. Almost all biologists are convinced that such self-replicating molecular structures and such a microcode are essential to life.

Lecturing in Dublin, one of the twentieth century's most famous physicists set the stage of contemporary biology during the war-heavy year of 1944. Given Erwin Schrödinger's towering reputation as the discoverer of the Schrödinger equation, the fundamental formulation of quantum mechanics, his public lectures and subsequent book were bound to draw high attention. But no one, not even Schrödinger himself, was likely to have foreseen the consequences. Schrödinger's What Is Life? is credited with inspiring a generation of physicists and biologists to seek the fundamental character of living systems. Schrödinger brought quantum mechanics, chemistry, and the still poorly formulated concept of “information” into biology. He is the progenitor of our understanding of DNA and the genetic code. Yet as brilliant as was Schrödinger's insight, I believe he missed the center. Investigations seeks that center and finds, in fact, a mystery.

In my previous two books, I laid out some of the growing reasons to think that evolution was even richer than Darwin supposed. Modern evolutionary theory, based on Darwin's concept of descent with heritable variations that are sifted by natural selection to retain the adaptive changes, has come to view selection as the sole source of order in biological organisms. But the snowflake's delicate sixfold symmetry tells us that order can arise without the benefit of natural selection. Origins of Order and At Home in the Universe give good grounds to think that much of the order in organisms, from the origin of life itself to the stunning order in the development of a newborn child from a fertilized egg, does not reflect selection alone.

Writing in Dublin in 1944, Erwin Schrödinger sought the source of order in biological systems. Given the recent radiation mutagenic evidence on the target size of a gene showing that a gene had at most a few thousand atoms, Schrödinger argued that the familiar order due to square root N fluctuations around an equilibrium was insufficient because the fluctuations were too large to account for the hereditary order seen in biology. He argued that quantum mechanics, via stable chemical bonds, was essential for that order. Then he made his brilliant leap. Noting that a periodic crystal could not “say” very much, he opted for genes as aperiodic crystals which, via the aperiodicity, would carry a microcode specifying the ontogeny of the organism. It was a mere two decades until the structure of the aperiodic double helix of DNA and much of the genetic code were known.

But did Schrödinger's book, What Is Life? actually answer his core question? I think not, and the aim of this chapter is to propose a different definition, one concerning what I call an “autonomous agent,” that may have stumbled on an adequate definition of life. I will not insist that I have succeeded, but at a minimum the definition leads in many useful and unexpected directions with import for physics, chemistry, biology, and beyond.

In Dublin half a century ago, a major figure in this century's science visited, lectured, and foretold the future of a science which was not his own. The resulting book, What is Life?, is credited with having inspired some of the most brilliant minds ever to enter biology to the work which gave birth to molecular biology (Schrödinger, 1944). Schrödinger's ‘little book’ is, itself, as brilliant as warranted by its reputation. But, half a century later, and at the occasion of its honouring, perhaps we may dare to ask a new question: is the central thesis of the book right? I mean no dishonour to so superb a mind as Schrödinger's, nor to those properly inspired by him, to suggest that he may have been wrong, or at least incomplete. Rather, of course, like all scientists inspired by his ideas, I too seek to continue the quest.

I am hesitant even to raise the questions I shall raise, for I am also fully aware of how deeply embedded Schrödinger's own answers are in our view of life since Darwin and Weismann, and since the development of the theory of the germ plasma, with the gene as the necessary stable storage form of heritable variation: ‘Order from order’, answered Schrödinger. The large aperiodic solids and the microcode of which Schrödinger spoke have become the DNA and the genetic code of today. Almost all biologists are convinced that such self-replicating molecular structures and such a microcode are essential to life.

I confess I am not entirely convinced.