Fractal catalytic model

The fractal catalytic model, proposed by Christopher James Davia, describes “an entirely novel principle that unites all living processes” by identifying enzymatic catalysis (taking place in cells) as a “prototypical process” which applies at all levels of scale in biological organisms.
The proposal is that at every level of scale (from enzyme to cell to organ to entire organism) living processes are processes of catalysis, and that all biological phenomena maintain their organization by mediating transitions in their environment, employing the same mechanisms as (catalytic) enzymes.
By providing a ‘unified theory’ of biology it automatically accounts for the coherence and robustness of organisms and additionally, by ‘reconciling’ thermodynamics with biology via the generalization of the notion of catalysis, it highlights “energy dissipation as playing a major role” in biological processes.
Organism robustness and catalysis
The fractal catalytic model (‘fcm’) proposes a literal correspondence between organism robustness and the manner in which catalysts ‘survive’ unchanged in chemical reactions via the following (summarised) argument: Consider a simple chemical environment consisting of just two reagents and a catalyst for their reaction together. A catalyst generally operates by participating in the reaction, in order to accelerate the reaction rate, and then emerge unchanged at the end - and hence is ‘never used up’ and could be said to ‘survive’ the reaction. Extend this idea to a ‘non-specific’ catalyst which can mediate a number of different reactions and we increase the complexity of the environment in which the catalyst can ‘survive’. Introducing a filter of some kind (analogous to a cell membrane) would limit catalyst exposure to only those reagents it can catalyze and hence allow it to ‘survive’ an even more complex environment. The fractal catalytic model simply extends this concept to all levels of the organism so that each organelle, cell, organ etc, up to and including the entire organism, maintains its organization by mediating transitions in its environment in the same way that a (catalytic) enzyme does.
This leads to the generalized notion that enzymatic catalysis in a cell is simply the lowest level example of a more general prototypical process operating at all levels of scale in biological processes (hence the term ‘fractal catalysis’ - or perhaps more correctly ‘scale invariant catalysis’). A general formulation for this proposal is that "life makes explicit the implicit order in the environmental survival space"
Solitons, energy and structure
Solitons (or ‘Solitary Waves’) are highly localised wave disturbances which propogate indefinitely without apparent energy loss (and hence are also known as ‘Indestructible Waves’). First reported (by John Scott Russell in 1834) as an anomalous effect occurring in a canal, it was later found they were the result of the interplay between linear and nonlinear effects in their supporting medium (basically: linear effects spread the wave, nonlinear effects compress the wave, and the soliton occurs where these two effects balance each other out).
The fcm interprets the persistence of solitons as resulting from the manner in which they ‘embody’ (or ‘make explicit’) the structure of the boundary conditions of the medium in which they are propagating (for example: the soliton moving in a canal exists as a solution to the regularity of the canal). The important emphasis here is that the catalytic model interprets the soliton as arising from the order in its environment and not existing despite the order (i.e. it doesn’t adapt to its environment, it is a manifestation of its environment).
By interpreting catalysis (and hence life) as fundamentally rooted in the soliton principle, fcm is led to the insight: “that catalysis is a process that works by removing the discontinuity between energy and structure ... thus enabling them to work together”.
This “collapse ... between energy and structure” allows the material substrate of the organism, and the energy which drives it, to integrate seamlessly into a “unique synthesis” so that “the persistence of the life process can be understood to arise, not because life actively maintains its own structure, but rather, as a consequence of the unique position that it occupies in the environment — a point where the usual discontinuities between energy and structure do not exist.”
Catalysis and cognition
The orthodox (‘functionalist’) account of cognition is that in order to recognize an object of perception, the brain performs some kind of information processing on the sensory data that ‘represents’ the object. In contrast, a catalytic model of cognition interprets the pattern of neural firing provided by the senses as constituting the ‘boundary conditions’ for the “evolution of (the brain’s) spatio/temporal dynamics in the form of solitons” .
Consequently, the macroscopic brain soliton (or complex of solitons) ‘sustain’ themselves by ‘utilizing’ (or 'existing in relation to') any implicit pattern(s) in the sensory stimulus.
This interpretation economically accounts for such aspects of ‘experience’ as its coherence (i.e. its ‘unity’) by virtue of the soliton’s status as a unified non-linear dynamic in which each ‘part’ of the soliton exists in a necessary relationship to all its other ‘parts’.
In such a model conscious states correlate to a process of macroscopic catalysis and are specifically located at the catalytically mediated ‘transition states’.
In addition, such high level (or ‘abstract’) mental processing as ‘association’, involving the move from one set of ideas to another set via an idea they hold in common, can be identified with a catalytically (i.e. soliton) mediated transition between two brain states via a symmetry condition they both share.
The most significant aspect of all, perhaps, is that under such a model both biological metabolism and the processes of cognition are unified by a single principle and are therefore just two aspects of the same fundamental process of (scale invariant) catalysis.

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