Electrodynamic Coherence as a Physical Basis for Emergence of Perception, Semantics, and Adaptation in Living Systems

Despite the successes earned in cataloguing and finding the role of the most of molecular components in living matter, the biochemical and molecular perspective, popular in biology, medicine and genetics, is unable to give account for crucial topics as the faculty of living systems to feel, to perceive what a given stimulus implies (means, indeed) for their survival. Condensed matter physics too, if bounded to a local, short-range, and perturbative approach, fails dramatically. This is also due to the role commonly assigned to water actually the main constituent of living matter deemed for long time to be merely chemical (as solvent or a reactant/product). Nonetheless, today many evidences show how living matter can be right conceived as a super-structured coherent water-based matrix, suggesting that the characterization of bio(electro)chemical and physical processes undertaken at molecular level in living matter, would let us unable to answer a question like this: what allows an amoeba, moreover without any neurons, to know to get closer to a nutrient or escape away from a toxin? I propose that to pursue such a fundamental inquiry its necessary an essentially relational approach, that is: to consider the living being at its grounding as the outcome of a physical history of relationships where symmetry-breakings, dissipation and coherence yield the emergence of the living state of matter, conceivable only as a time-dependent open process, and not as a portraited body. The effective tools to build up such an approach may be retrieved in far-from-equilibrium thermodynamics (TD), symmetry-breakings and gauge-fields theory, science of complexity, within the framework of a Quantum Field Theory. Indeed, within a field-view of matter, and of water especially, as it has been developed by a Quantum Electrodynamic (QED) description of condensed matter, its possible to give account for a physical basis too such an epistemologically elusive, though crucial, feature of living systems (i.e.: perception and meaning). The emerging landscape allows some important meditations about adaptation, evolution, ecodynamics, and about different conceptions of complexity and information in living realm. Furthermore, some neuroscientific themes like consciousness, qualia and their links to artificial intelligence could be supplied with due insights.