This is a sort of update on the talk I gave in March — we've been moving on since then. Just a few acknowledgments. I've been doing a lot of collaboration with Mrittunjoy Guha Majumdar: he's the main collaborator and he's just put up a preprint, I think pretty preliminary but it includes the main ideas.

And other people. Ilexa Yardley: she contacted me a long time ago with some pretty incomprehensible ideas. I've only gradually come to understand what it's all about, because it turns out we're dealing with something that's really pretty complicated and intricate so it's rather difficult to explain. I hope I’ve managed to do that, to some extent. I've been having some discussions with Scott Kelso who’s one of the main people involved in coordination dynamics, which is a fairly rigorous approach to the complexities of biological systems. And then there’s Peirce, going back to the 19th century. He brought up sign theory. And that's important because it deals with meaning and thought — we think in terms of signs; and so on.

Just a point I've made before, that I think the current physics paradigm has got into problems. I’ll just mention two of them. There's a nice unification of the three forces, strong, weak and electromagnetic, but unifying gravity is a bit of a problem: people aren't sure how to do it. And the theories that have been produced, you can't combine with experiments. Another major problem is the question of the role of observation. So that's a little bit mysterious.

So I think we can get beyond this, this requires new ways of looking at nature. You're looking at different patterns, different languages, and we need to take the suggestion of Steve Jobs, we need to ‘think different’: we do need to think differently.

So, as an introduction to this different way of thinking, I have here the general idea as to how science works. In general, you start from your observations of nature, and then you find certain phenomena, regularities. You then describe these phenomena in terms of language. And you can talk about the phenomena, and then produce theories. So that's what we need to do to get beyond where physics is stuck. But, as I’ve said before, biology has got ideas and language and what we've been doing is to put them all together, to try to put them together to get a unified picture, and it's all pretty complicated.

Just a comment before I start on some details. Physics and biology have rather different approaches, physics being centred around calculations, numbers, equations, whereas biology more asks what is going on, produces its own language, for example, ‘how does virus infection occur?’. Biology makes a complicated story, which is different from the calculations that you get in physics. One point about biology is, relationships play an important role.

And now the point is going to be that we start by looking at biology, but then we say perhaps the same principles apply at a fundamental level as well. And that's what we need to get a good picture at a fundamental level, and this idea is supported by interesting parallels between quantum mechanics and biology. A paper I did in the 1980s with Michael Conrad and Dipankar Home, called ‘a realist psychological interpretation of physical reality’ indicated what these parallels were. Similarly, in a book ‘Meeting the Universe Halfway’, Karen Barad suggests that the things that happen in the quantum world are the same sort of things that happen in human communities, and she's able to account for some features of quantum mechanics in that way.

OK then. I'm going to start talking about pieces of a puzzle. It's a puzzle how life works, basically. So here are a number of pieces.

• First of all, something which we think is important. It's at the fundamental level: it's something that's a bit novel maybe. We start by thinking about equilibrium. Equilibrium is a funny thing because you think it means no change, but actually there are fluctuations occurring all the time. So, these two things are happening together.
• Now we say organised fluctuations, because we want there to be organisation in biology.
• And so the question of coordination appears — I’ll say more quite a bit more later about coordination.
• Various structures: some are metastable, they come out of the investigations of Kelso and others, some things persist.
• There are self-replication mechanisms. So a particular feature of the system may get replicated, and then spread. So we can get users of language because there are mechanisms for replicating language, you can get a domain associated with a particular language, and similar things in biology generally, species and so on.
• Computation plays an important part in biology. Systems compute what to do. Related to that is the information that computation is involved with.
• Information consists of signs: they signify things.
• Also important turns out to be code systems.
• Then I think, which will turn out to be very relevant because it's what's involved in a relationship between mind and actuality, and that’s the duality between codes which mind works with, and actuality which is what it refers to.
• Then there’s the way biological systems evolve, and we believe one of the aspects of this evolution is the universe with its various laws.

OK, now let me start going through details. I mentioned that an equilibrium system undergoes fluctuations. And these fluctuations are not necessarily random, they interact with each other and they become can become coordinated. So what about coordination. Well, I think we find in biology, as Kelso says, is things are immensely complicated in biology, but they get organised into these units called synergies. And these units are functional systems, so individual pieces work together as units. It's unlike in physics, you get synergies in physics, I'll show some in a moment. But in biology, you'll get complex hierarchical structure. So it's a much more difficult thing; biologists have a more difficult job to do and physicists will also have to tackle this.

OK, so here's a picture. I got this from Wikipedia. I don't know what the numbers mean, but it's just to show a hierarchical structure. Now I want to make a point that synergies are involved. Well, here we have a unit. And inside that unit there are systems coordinating together, and then a system exerts controls from outside. These are the basic things that happen with synergies and there’s this complex structure you see on the right. Now I’ll just give an illustrative example. On the right you see coordinated spins lining up, and outside you see a magnet that can control the whole system.

That's just a sketch. And now this picture is from an article by Scott Kelso: how ordinary physics works, and coordination dynamics. And you can see they are different things, instead of forces you have information exchange. Physics likes to deal with linear systems, in contrast with nonlinear in coordination dynamics, and you get bifurcation. Synergies may be stable systems or metastable systems and so on. That means you will get a situation that is stable for a time and then flip and something different will appear. Also disruption may dispose of unsuitable combinations.

Here, we have, we're going to play music to water. It's quite amazing what happens. I can play the music … as the music changes you get interesting things happening. You have a container (a cuvette) and it's vibrated at the bottom from a speaker. You shine light off the top and then you photograph the reflection off the surface. So this shows that you don't need a complicated biological system to get signs to work; this will happen even with water.

That’s just to make my point about signs. Now an illustration of signs is language, of course, that's
something which causes coordination; people coordinate using this kind of sign we know as language, and as a coordinative structure pieces of language are in chunks like a phrase, it’s got that kind of structure, which I illustrate again as before: structures of language are a bit like that.

Now we can go beyond this because of a computer simulation due to Winograd. He wrote a sort of basic component of language concerned with a ‘blocks world’, doing things like answering questions. So you feed text into it and the program does relevant things. It contains expert functions which respond appropriately to input. And what the experts do themselves, they create synergies that do things. This is an illustration of how complicated things work in biology. But you could say, well, he doesn't do language acquisition, but you can say that what's happening is that language users discover mechanisms which are effective in a particular environment.

And I think it's important here, part of a picture, is that there’s a pairing between functions of language and the environment in which they work. Bits of code, which are just information, and the actuality it relates to — these are complementary. So, as things develop, the code and the actuality the code refers to both arise, and this is what Yardley is talking about in an obscure away.

Someone called Shakespeare said, ‘what's in a name’ (or at least that was in one of his plays). So he was showing names at work. I have part of a London Underground map here. And lots of names, such as ‘Oxford Circus’. And what happens is that this representation and reality, they share things (and also color symbolises lines and so on). And it is because [representation and actualty] share the names that you're able to use them. So in other words, names enable actuality and its representation to be coordinated. This is quite a general thing. So you've actually got this triad.

This shows pairing at work. I’ve got two units here I call X and Y. Now a more mathematical part, which is in the paper we’re preparing, relates this to the degrees of freedom of systems, it’s the degrees of freedom which get connected. So you say, we have two systems X and Y. I'm showing degrees of freedom, X1, X2 and X3 for X, and for Y, Y1, Y2, Y3. X1 might be things that you're doing in relationship to the station, and then you do things in relation to the representation of it as well. So it's because they're sharing the name, they’re linked together in this way, that allows you to to coordinate the two things. So certain degrees of freedom, which get linked together, as in mathematical theory that we're producing, which [linkage] lets them move together. It’s fairly intuitive that if you connect together particular degrees of freedom, with two systems, this makes them move together. This is basically what Yardley’s referring to when she talks about oppositional dynamics. So these are two things which are separate and also joined, like two systems in phase equilibrium.

OK, now here’s speculation as to how this all comes about, because we're going to say organisation happens spontaneously and this is how mind arises, life arises. We start off with saying humans create symbols for a reason: there’s a purpose in naming something you want to communicate; they stabilise a situation. Yardley suggests this is universal. Let me quote: this third entity which goes along with two things, it's joining them, this ‘produces stability and reliability for reality which, in and of itself, is markedly unstable and unreliable’. So, in other words, you have what we think of as a uniform background, a ‘one field’ this field is present, and systems come together for a time; they come together more effectively if there's a system that compares them, which operates in the manner of a symbol. And the way you could get these pairs produced is either two pairs can go together as in my previous diagram, or one thing could split up into two, which is like an oscillation which splits up into two things, two different oscillations. So in other words these are the fundamental physical processes which all get together in a complicated way giving you mind.

Also you get context coming in here. I talked about this in connection with language, because there are mechanisms for propagating activity and relationships. You then can create a domain in which things happen. And it's like ecosystems: units together act as an ecosystem that supports the units concerned.

So there’s a whole collection of ideas here. And one further idea: there's another pair, which is operations and states. Operations work on states: they cause one state to turn into another. And when two states are together, this can create an operation that will turn one state into another. It is pairing two things which reinforce each other. A further complication is that the operations are connected with codes, as I've said, so we actually operate via code systems; this picture shows codes operating upon states via interpretation.

This is parallel to how computers work. The hardware is different: computers use specific collections of codes defining operations which work on corresponding systems. So descriptions can also create systems.

Now I'm going to connect to other ideas. The way we picture this work is like Wheeler’s ‘observer-participancy’. Wheeler suggested that laws of Nature evolve because observers participate in nature. Then somehow they do things, they set up laws. So this is a sort of picture of how these things happen: laws can dictate structure. We know that happens: law do build structure. And then, linking back to previous ideas, we said degrees of freedom may define a space and then laws can define something within that space. So, for example, the group structure is associated with certain laws: how operations work together, and also group representations. So we now say that you could create a space out of the group that defines a space. So roughly speaking, this is the mechanism which my colleagues been working on in some detail that says there’s some kind of group which will generate space-time. Once you've got space-time you'll get further things, themes appear associated with particles and fields.

And this fits into the concept of evolutionary processes. What's involved is existing systems discover new possibilities, new laws, and the particularly interesting laws are those which are associated with a big range of possibilities. That’s how life works: new genotypes associated with phenotypes, which enlarge its capabilities.

And this you can all describe in terms of synergies. New themes can emerge and propagate, a metaphor for which is to say certain generic forms could become ‘part of the scenery’. And then, as I've indicated, some of these themes are associated with particles and forces: they emerge as the universe expands.

That's all more or less what I want to say now — it's a complicated picture, but biology is complicated. The idea is that this is what's going on in mind, a complicated kind of organisation in which all sorts of things happen, and that’s the new physics.

This is Schrödinger’s cat, which escaped from Schrödinger’s laboratory and visits us occasionally! So I’ll finish there.