Negentropy

Coupled cycles are the stuff of living organization, as a most cursory glance at a metabolic chart of ‘biochemical pathways’ will immediately reveal to us. It is how living systems store and mobilize energy: the energy yielding cycles are almost always coupled to energy requiring ones so that energy can be transferred to larger and larger space-time domains. . . A particularly interesting finding is that for all organisms, from protozoa to vertebrates without exception, the anterior-posterior axis of the body is also the major polarizing axis for all of the tissues. This is quite compelling evidence for some kind of globally coherent polarizing field, which not only gives rise to the major body axis, but also phase-order the molecules all over the body. . . Coupled cyclic processes structure space and time for energy storage and mobilization . . . we can think in terms of the organism as a nested structure of coupled cycles within coupled cycles spanning the entire range of characteristic space-time domains . . . Popp and many others since, have found that all organisms emit light (‘biophotons’) at ultraweak intensities from a few photons per cell per day to several hundred photons per organism per second, which are strongly correlated with the cell cycle and other functional states . . . What this implies is that photons are held in a coherent form in the organism, and when stimulated, they are emitted coherently, like a very weak, multimode laser. . . The stimulated emission always covers the same broad range, regardless of the composition of the light used to induce it, and furthermore, can retain its spectral distribution even when the system is perturbed to such an extent that the emission intensity changes over several orders of magnitude. These observations are consistent with the idea that the living system is one coherent ‘photon field’ bound to living matter. This photon field is maintained far from thermodynamic equilibrium, and is coherent simultaneously in a whole range of frequencies that are nonetheless coupled together to give, in effect, a single degree of freedom. This means that random energy input to any frequency will become delocalized over all frequencies, precisely as predicted in a system in which energy is stored and mobilized over all space-time domains. . . for living systems, it is also the state of minimum entropy because the activities in all space-time domains are effectively coupled so there is only a single actual degree of freedom . . . ‘Negentropy’, as stored mobilizable energy in a space-time structured (organized) system, can be intuitively understood as follows. In an equilibrium system, energy is fixed, which in turn fixes the population of energy levels characteristic of the temperature of the system. In a nonequilibrium system such as the organism, energy is stored over all space-time domains. For a given temperature, the energy stored is no longer fixed, but on account of efficient coupling, becomes transferred to ever larger space-time domains (starting from the photon trapped in photosynthesis, or the energy in food) until all characteristic domains are equally populated.
Mae-Wan Ho, “What is Schrodinger’s Negentropy?”