Conversation

## I had never really read any Ray Peat before this and I'm hooked

Q: What would you say biological energy is and why is understanding it so important?

Ray Peat: “That’s something that the way you go about answering it explains who you are really. For thousands of years, people had different ways of talking about biological energy—that it’s something that makes potential become real and is something that causes change of properties. It’s a property of matter, and some of the first physicists called it the living force. So physical force, physical energy, originally was somehow identified with life process itself. They used life language to explain the energy involved in swinging balls or converting motion to heat and so on.
From about Leibniz’s time on, it became abstracted increasingly until they got a very neat conservation idea for energy—that this property, which is the living force in something moving (kinetic energy), is the same stuff which changes and becomes a heat property in something else or in the same stuff. And this heat property is also the kinetic energy which can become chemical energy and stored and released by burning and so on. And the potential energy is even more abstract—it’s related to, for example, the distance between charges and separation of heavy objects and so on.
But despite the abstraction of it, the idea that it’s a property of things or of matter—that’s okay. When you start thinking about hysteresis, the trace that energy leaves in matter as it runs through whatever it is—one substance passing through another one or near another one—it traces some kind of a track that is more or less detectable as an interaction. And that idea that the energy produces a change in the arrangement of substance—that’s, I think, the most important idea for thinking about biological energy.
Vernadsky, who integrated biology with cosmology, showed that organisms, through photosynthesis and metabolism, are converting solar energy—light and heat—to structure. First, they turn carbon dioxide and water to sugar, and then the sugar process is processed through the cells. Eventually, you get an organism which has this energy flowing through it, and the more intense the flow, the more hysteresis is writing changes in the structure and capturing some of the energy in the form of complexity.
Vernadsky described the tendency of any system in terms of the French person (Le Chatelier) describing a disturbed system that readjusts to minimize the disturbance. Le Chatelier and Vernadsky simply applied that to the cosmos and showed that solar energy, being absorbed on the Earth, complexifies and generates structure. And that the structure tends to maximize the flow of energy through itself. In the case of plants, this leads to very big sequoia trees and such. In the case of animals, you get elephants, and especially the brain—there’s a tendency for the brain as part of the complexifying of the organism so that you can get more complex structures of all sorts, as well as a greater complexity of energy processing right in the brain.
So the biggest brain is projected to come in the future as the energy supply becomes greater. He saw life as being driven, rather than as being an accidental accumulation that somehow at its essence was random. For him, the whole process from the bottom up is driven and tending to a maximum of complexity.
The idea that it’s the flow of energy through the whole system that constitutes us, and that all of our functions and purposes are energy exchanges—so in our very being, we represent the history of energy flowing, and everything we do involves a consciousness. I think the essential way to grasp consciousness is that it’s what happens when you have a very complex flow of information through stuff. If you simply heat a rock on one side, energy is flowing through it and it’s creating some coherent processes. But when you get a nervous system and all of the complex juices surrounding the nerves and the electrical fields interacting, then the flow of energy through a system—essentially what’s happening when you heat a rock, but in an infinitely more complex way—and the substance participates in guiding and intensifying that.
So our goals and functions are, in a way, as inclined to a certain kind of direction as the development of large-brained big organisms is—simply because it’s being driven. And as participants in this energy flow, the optimization of energy flow or of consciousness involves certain ways of interacting between people and atmosphere and light and so on. And so the nature of our each little behavior has this context in which we’re trying to reach a higher energy level and, in effect, a better resonance between the components of the system.
The idea of resonance in substance is very applicable to what’s going on in our organism. If you have methane in the atmosphere and some oxygen and you ignite it, the first thing that happens isn’t that you get carbon dioxide and water. The first thing that is likely to happen is you get a lot of soot, and soot consists of graphite-like systems in which you get polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. And those are highly organized resonant systems. Resonance stability guides the chemical reactions, so it’s more stable to be in this complex system and more favorable energetically.
When our brains resonate with the environment in a certain way, they are improved by finding the niche in which they can resonate and find a higher functioning. So it’s as if we’re relaxing into a more intense consciousness. The high-energy resting state is what I call the individual cell state, but it also applies to the brain itself. In the very high-energy resting state, we get resonance, and so things are more meaningful. And so the consciousness is more intense, more coherent, luminous, and so on.”

Public

Notices

Feeds