Reframing Some Methods in Life Sciences: Relationship and Causation in Living Matter

Abstract

The present study aims to stimulate the attention to some subtle methodological issues about living dynamics in various disciplines (as physics, biology, medicine, philosophy of science). The conceptual core of this work is to prove and make it clear that a living system cannot be conceived, and therefore neither studied, as "an object", "a body". In consequence of this acknowledgment, a lot of improvements in the layout and in the interpretation of results in the whole research about biological systems are possible. The relational nature of the living being is founded on dissipation, symmetry breakings, and field theories capable of accounting for multiple levels of vacuum (such as Quantum Field Theory, QFT), and sees the living phase of condensed matter (on an aqueous basis) as a result of bosonic condensation of correlation quanta (the well-known Nambu-Goldstone bosons) over an extended and interconnected hierarchy of degrees of freedom to which (super) coherent states are associated. The phase correlations established among the components of living matter (as molecules, ions, electrical charges, photons, quasi-particles in general) let a holonomic state of the system emerge (where a common multiplexed eigenstate of phase holds). This is the physical basis for the biological self, the "identity" of an organism, endowed with continuity, despite it is a dynamical openness. Indeed, this identity is a flow and not an isolable object: the only permanence in a living system is the becoming, the change, the dynamics. This condition implies that the study of any biological system is in fact the study of a flow of relationships, and the living system (whether a cell, a complex organism, or an ecosystem) should be conceived as a process dissipatively coupled to its environment and as a producer of responses following an autopoietic order, inherent in the very condition of coherence (as long as it exists). Once this is recognized we get the possibility to reduce (without ontological discontinuities) sophisticated emergent properties (such as sensing, perception, semantics, teleology, adaptation, memory) and conceive the emergence of "biological laws" that, in addition to physical ones, dictating action-reaction constraints, describe stimulus-response relationships, valid only for the living state. The existence of these "laws" (analogical, but now physically grounded) demands us to revise the definition of causality in biology, understanding that the method of inquiry must be updated both on theory and experimental fronts.