Engineering - Molecular Theory of the Living Cell - page 145

uncertainty associated with defining the mind, D B is the uncertainty associated with
defining the body, D S is the uncertainty about what constitutes soul, D P is the
uncertainty about what determines one's personality, and u expressed in fits, the
fuzzy units (Kosko 1993), is thought to be the minimum amount of uncertainty that
necessarily accompanies all human knowledge and communication. “Knowledge”
is here defined simply as the ability to answer questions, and the amount of the
knowledge a person possess can be measured by the number of questions that can
be answered by a person possessing the knowledge. Inequality (5.53) may be
interpreted as stating that the more precisely one determines what mind is in
nonmaterial terms, the less precisely can one define the role of the body in the
phenomenon of mind. Similarly, the more precisely one determines what the body
is from the biochemical and physiological perspectives, the less precisely can one
determine what mind is from the psychological perspective. This complementarity-
based view of mind appears to be consistent with the hologram-based theory of
mind proposed by Pribram (2010). Inequality (5.54) may be interpreted to mean
that the more precisely one determines what soul is, the less precisely can one
determine what personality is. The more precisely one can determine what person-
ality is, the less precisely can one determine what soul is. This conjecture was
motivated by the statement made by a Japanese theologian in Tokyo in the mid-
1990s to the effect that “it is relatively easy to know whether a human being has a
personality but it is very difficult to know whether he or she has a soul.”
The three kinds of the uncertainty principles described in Tables 5.6 , 5.7 , and 5.8
are recapitulated in Table 5.9 , along with their associated complementarity
principles.
Several features emerge from Table 5.9 :
1. Although the first mathematical expression of the uncertainty principle was
discovered in physics by Heisenberg in 1926 (Lindley 2008), the qualitative
concept of uncertainty in human knowledge is much older, going back to Lao-
tse, for example (see Statement 5.22). The mathematical expressions for the
uncertainty principle applicable to cell biology and psychology/philosophy are
formulated for the first time in this topic (see the first and second rows in
Table 5.9 ).
2. The intense discussions on Heisenberg's uncertainty principle in physics and
philosophy of science during the past seven decades (Murdoch 1987; Plotnitsky
2006; Lindley 2008) have created the impression that there exists only one
overarching principle of uncertainty, namely, that of Heisenberg. But Table 5.9
suggests that there exists a multiplicity of uncertainty principles, each reflecting
specific mechanisms of interactions among the components of the system under
consideration, from the atom to the cell to the human brain. Just as the comple-
mentarity principle advocated by Bohr on the basis of quantum mechanical
findings was postulated to have counterparts in fields other than physics (Bohr
1933, 1958; Pais 1991; Ji 1991, 1993, 1995; Kelso and EngstrØm 2006; Barab
2010), so it appears that the uncertainty principle first recognized in quantum
mechanics has counterparts in fields other than physics.