Quote:
Originally Posted by Ken G
Thus the idea would be that you can describe a living thing by all its parts, but in the process losing their united function, or you can consider the united function, but then you cannot understand what is happening at the molecular level. . . . it is more like, to know the poem is to lose information about what words went into it, or to know every word in the poem is to not be able to understand the poem. That's a much trickier principle, found only (so far) in quantum mechanics.
|
Well then, what happens in biology is just the opposite of complementarity. The functional and molecular explanations reinforce each other: to know about one only deepens the understanding of the other, and vice versa; whereas in QM, knowing about position obscures knowledge of momentum, or observing particle-like properties obscures wave-like properties.