The Working Of An Organism Requires Exact Physical Laws

We feel and think and perceive.

All the other physiological process play an auxiliary part to the process responsible for thought and sense.

Why should our brain, with the sensorial system attached to it, have so many atoms for its physically changing state to correspond with a highly developed thought?

This is because a thought:

• is an orderly thing, and
• can only be applied to material, i.e. to perceptions or experiences, which have a certain degree of orderliness.

This has 2 consequences.

1. For a brain (physical organization) to be in close correspondence with thought, it must be a very well-ordered organization.

This means that the events that happen within it must obey strict physical laws, at least to a very high degree of accuracy.

2. The physical impressions made on that brain (physically well-organized system) by other external bodies obviously correspond to the perception and experience of the corresponding thought, forming its ‘material’, as I have called it.

Therefore, the physical interactions between our system and others must, as a rule, themselves have a certain physical orderliness.

They too must obey strict physical laws to a certain degree of accuracy.

Physical Laws Rest On Atomic Statistics And Are Therefore Only Approximate

Why could this not be fulfilled by a brain of a few atoms only?

All atoms perform a completely disorderly heat motion which:

• opposes their orderly behaviour
• does not allow the events that happen between a few atoms to enrol themselves according to any recognizable laws

Only in the co-operation of a huge number of atoms do statistical laws begin to operate and control the behaviour of these assemblies accurately.

• This accuracy increases as the number of atoms involved increases.

This is how the events acquire truly orderly features.

All the physical and chemical laws that play a part in the life of organisms are of this statistical kind.

Any other kind of lawfulness and orderliness that one might think of is being perpetually disturbed and made inoperative by the unceasing heat motion of the atoms.

Their Precision Is Based On The Large Number Of Atoms Intervening.

Example 1 (PARAMAGNETISM)

If you fill an oblong quartz tube with oxygen gas and put it into a magnetic field, the gas becomes magnetized.

The oxygen molecules are little magnets which orientate themselves parallel to the field, like a compass needle.

But they do not actually all turn parallel. For if you double the field, you get double the magnetization in your oxygen body.

This is an example of a purely statistical law.

The orientation of the field is continually counteracted by the heat motion, which works for random orientation.

The effect of this striving is, actually, only a small preference for acute over obtuse angles between the dipole axes and the field.

This behaviour entirely depends on so many molecules which co-operate in producing the observable magnetization.

Otherwise, the latter would not be constant at all, but would, by fluctuating quite irregularly from one second to the next, bear witness to the vicissitudes of the contest between heat motion and field.