The Origin of the First Living Cell with or without Evolution?
It is generally portrayed by media outlets that the origin of life can simply be explained by Evolution - yet the only known mechanism for evolution that we have discovered in the universe simply cannot do it.
In simple terms - that single evolutionary mechanism is the Living Cell, and there is no conceivable way that anyone has found to produce the true complexity of the 1st living cell from the sterile chemicals of the early Earth, without a prior living cell to do it. That is the dilemma.
It is what sparked the origin of Abiogenesis - the field of scientific research that now tries to explain how the first living cell was achieved, (with almost no progress on the key points after decades of research and experimentation).
As mentioned elsewhere, individual cells - even for the most basic forms of life such as bacteria or archaea - are incredibly complex. They have been likened to true 'cities' of activity with :-
Dawkins described living beings are the most complex things in the whole of existence - and he may well be right. He also majors on how evolution can develop a species and make complex things out of simple ones. But as Finipolscie points out, evolution is a process of change, it is not a process of start.
So Dawkins cannot address the question of origin based on the known mechanism for reproduction because the first cell would still have been complex, and certain elements - like the pre-existing DNA template for thousands of proteins; plus ribosomes; and the whole mechanisms of reproduction and metabolism must have been there before the first cell membrane encompassed them in some way.
When you look at the odds of forming just a simple average protein (involving a thousand or more amino acids) from just the necessary 22 amino acid components, (out of a selection of 500), by chance alone, that one protein has odds of 10 to the power 260 - which is more permutations than there are atoms in the universe. Furthermore, it would be necessary to have more than one of that protein in order to allow nature to experiment and find other proteins that it could achieve something useful with - and this means that if such a protein did bust all odds to occur once within the time available since the Big Bang, it truly couldn't be expected to happen by chance again - ever.
A single cell also needs thousands of specialist proteins all working in perfect harmony, for it to exist and work.
So the only way to achieve this would be to have a reliable replication/evolution process before the only one we know to have ever existed - a mechanism which is incredibly complex and involves the coding and de-coding of information 3 times in the process that we have.
Codes - just think about that. Codes that interlink with other codes to achieve something useful - when sterile chemicals have no objective for any outcome. They are not interested in generating life.
The evolutionary process described by Darwin relied on survival and selection. To make evolution fit into the timescale since the emergence of our solar system - and indeed, in the gap of 100m years between the rocks cooling to bearable levels and the time that the first evidence for the presence of the first cells emerges (ie. traces of slime mould in rocks) Dawkins added a process of 'positive selection' in which creatures select desirable features when choosing a mate. We come back to the point that there has to be some factor like thought or survival, (which often requires thought), which gives evolution an apparent direction, in order to achieve the evolution we recognise.
Abiogenesis has failed to show that all of the 22 necessary amino acids for life can be generated from the same chemical mix/start point, because chemical environments necessary for some amino acids would be harmful to others. They also require a certain mix of base chemicals to achieve the chemical make up of DNA and RNA - chemicals - and those chemicals were not thought to be present on earth - but only in surrounding space at best.
So the mystery of the origin of life is very real.
Even if you could find an alternate mechanism for accurate chemical reproduction - what could give it its sense of direction before life had an in interest in preserving itself. Whatever factor could apply to chemicals alone, to start giving an evolutionary direction in favour of life?
In simple terms - that single evolutionary mechanism is the Living Cell, and there is no conceivable way that anyone has found to produce the true complexity of the 1st living cell from the sterile chemicals of the early Earth, without a prior living cell to do it. That is the dilemma.
It is what sparked the origin of Abiogenesis - the field of scientific research that now tries to explain how the first living cell was achieved, (with almost no progress on the key points after decades of research and experimentation).
As mentioned elsewhere, individual cells - even for the most basic forms of life such as bacteria or archaea - are incredibly complex. They have been likened to true 'cities' of activity with :-
- genuine programmable manufacturing assembly lines (called Ribosomes);
- elaborate transport mechanisms which take manufactured proteins to the places in a cell which can make use of them;
- to the 'central library' of DNA;
- the 'hospital service' which repairs DNA up to 10,000 times a day within a single cell;
- 'power stations' to generate energy;
- 'food production' to generate the sub-components for fats, amino acids, DNA, RNA, etc.;
- waste disposal and recycling processes.
Dawkins described living beings are the most complex things in the whole of existence - and he may well be right. He also majors on how evolution can develop a species and make complex things out of simple ones. But as Finipolscie points out, evolution is a process of change, it is not a process of start.
So Dawkins cannot address the question of origin based on the known mechanism for reproduction because the first cell would still have been complex, and certain elements - like the pre-existing DNA template for thousands of proteins; plus ribosomes; and the whole mechanisms of reproduction and metabolism must have been there before the first cell membrane encompassed them in some way.
When you look at the odds of forming just a simple average protein (involving a thousand or more amino acids) from just the necessary 22 amino acid components, (out of a selection of 500), by chance alone, that one protein has odds of 10 to the power 260 - which is more permutations than there are atoms in the universe. Furthermore, it would be necessary to have more than one of that protein in order to allow nature to experiment and find other proteins that it could achieve something useful with - and this means that if such a protein did bust all odds to occur once within the time available since the Big Bang, it truly couldn't be expected to happen by chance again - ever.
A single cell also needs thousands of specialist proteins all working in perfect harmony, for it to exist and work.
So the only way to achieve this would be to have a reliable replication/evolution process before the only one we know to have ever existed - a mechanism which is incredibly complex and involves the coding and de-coding of information 3 times in the process that we have.
Codes - just think about that. Codes that interlink with other codes to achieve something useful - when sterile chemicals have no objective for any outcome. They are not interested in generating life.
The evolutionary process described by Darwin relied on survival and selection. To make evolution fit into the timescale since the emergence of our solar system - and indeed, in the gap of 100m years between the rocks cooling to bearable levels and the time that the first evidence for the presence of the first cells emerges (ie. traces of slime mould in rocks) Dawkins added a process of 'positive selection' in which creatures select desirable features when choosing a mate. We come back to the point that there has to be some factor like thought or survival, (which often requires thought), which gives evolution an apparent direction, in order to achieve the evolution we recognise.
Abiogenesis has failed to show that all of the 22 necessary amino acids for life can be generated from the same chemical mix/start point, because chemical environments necessary for some amino acids would be harmful to others. They also require a certain mix of base chemicals to achieve the chemical make up of DNA and RNA - chemicals - and those chemicals were not thought to be present on earth - but only in surrounding space at best.
So the mystery of the origin of life is very real.
Even if you could find an alternate mechanism for accurate chemical reproduction - what could give it its sense of direction before life had an in interest in preserving itself. Whatever factor could apply to chemicals alone, to start giving an evolutionary direction in favour of life?
Comments (320)
The answer might be found elsewhere in the solar system or galaxy, should we be lucky and alert enough to happen upon a pool of proto-slop stumbling toward life. Highly unlikely, at best.
Evolution is the process of any change over time. In a more narrow biological sense, evolution is random spread of differences followed by statistical natural selection of traits. General evolution is not at all concerned with the peculiarity of life on this planet but with the universe as a whole and all of its developments.
In a more narrow biological sense, evolution is random spread of differences in living organisms followed by statistical natural selection of traits. Here,we are making Life an object on a pedestal. As important as life is to us living, nature might not be making this distinction.
Where the test comes in is in borderline cases like viruses that have some but not all classified features of being alive. Are viruses alive? Did viruses come before or after bacteria?
No one denies this. Responsible scientists do not. The best answer to the question of abiogenesis is we don't yet know how it happened. But filling the hole with a fantasy because don't yet have an answer is not cool either. I recently spoke to some people who are certain life on earth was manufactured by aliens.
No reputable biologist in the last 100 years, if ever, has proposed evolution as described by Darwin as the mechanism for the origin of life.
Quoting Gary Enfield
Quoting Gary Enfield
You have misrepresented the current scientific understanding of potential mechanisms for abiogenesis. No current biologist proposes that cells are built up from constituent chemicals "by chance alone." The only ones I've seen who do are creationism apologists trying to undermine the credibility of current science. Have you read any modern science-based literature on abiogenesis? Suggest "Life's Ratchet," recommended by @apokrisis a few years ago. It changed my understanding of how the world works.
Cell division is chemically simple and automatic. In experiments, phospholipid bilayers pinch in two when they contain enough molecules, without any enzymes or biochemical machinery required. Mitosis and meiosis are regulated versions of what is at base a completely spontaneous process. Cellular mechanisms may actually constrain rather than induce the multiplication of cells.
The amount of recursive order vs. disorder in macromolecules might be overestimated by intro theory. If you look at a ribosome (image of ribosome subunit), drawn from a post in the thread "Nothing to do with Dennett's Quining Qualia" at this forum, the complexity implies that every single one probably contains much variation. Life's processes seem at base messier and more haphazard than the picture obtained from your average textbook. When I look at this, I see an RNA tangle of a kind that could have arisen as the first protocellular colonies combined and divided at least millions of times per day.
A plausible quantum mechanism of biochemical evolution has been proposed: atoms within macromolecules existing in superposition during which they are in multiple states at once, meaning that some molecules are in hundreds or even thousands of different configurations simultaneously, greatly reducing the span of time necessary to reach optimum adaptation by naturally selected collapse of the wave function.
Missing links such as the ribozyme have been discovered, hybrids of protein and RNA segments that catalyze their own replicative processes.
This does not rule out some kind of preternatural intervention, but mechanisms by which evolution can occur, whatever its conscious or nonconscious causes, are being proposed and discovered.
Anyway - there are some current books which propose solutions to the problem you've raised - see
https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/0393352978/
https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B06XKW9RGH/ (mentioned by T. Clark above).
Quoting T Clark
I too learned a ton of stuff from @apokrisis about this issue, even if life's too short to follow up on all the reading required to really grasp the details.
There's a philosophical issue, however. Notice the implicit dichotomy - that either the scientific analysis is accepted, or you're likely a creationist. These are the jaws of the dilemma that Thomas Nagel found himself in, when he published his 2012 book Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False. He was accused of 'giving aid and comfort to creationists' - even though Nagel himself professes atheism! (See this.)
What concerns me about the scientific analysis, is that it often can't help but be reductionist: to declare that life is simply a complex transactional relationship between various classes of molecules. I can see why that kind of analysis appeals to engineers (like yourself!), but I think it leaves something out. But if you try and describe what is 'left out', then you can't do it in terms which are intelligible to the perspective of engineering.
There's another biosemiotic theorist I've encountered, called Marcello Barbieri. He doesn't agree with 'physicalism' (the notion that at its basis, life is simply molecules in motion) but also doesn't come anywhere near to intelligent design. See What is information?
I think that is a well-formulated question. The problem it articulates is that of intention - that life, even the very simplest forms of life, seem to possess an intentional aim, namely, to survive and propagate. And it's hard to imagine how 'the intention to survive' could even be concieved in terms of chemical replication. It is precisely with the emergence of living things that intentional behaviour begins to manifest - yet 'intentionality' is just the very factor that physicalist accounts want to dispense with, because of its association with purpose and the dreaded 'telos' of Aristotelian philosophy.
Survival with self-reflection brings the endless loop. To know one is surviving and can do otherwise while surviving and accepting this.
This is from the Amazon description of Nagel's Mind and Cosmos:
And the cosmological history that led to the origin of life and the coming into existence of the conditions for evolution cannot be a merely materialist history, either. An adequate conception of nature would have to explain the appearance in the universe of materially irreducible conscious minds, as such.
I don't buy the views expressed in either your or Nagel's quotes above. They seem disrespectful to me. They seem to deny that consciousness is integral to, an intimate part of, our universe. Consciousness is nothing special any more than neutrinos, cockroaches, or I are. It's just one of what Lao Tzu would call the 10,000 things. Just stuff.
Quoting Wayfarer
Good question, although I don't know if it's relevant to this discussion. Here's a first guess - the world is already full. No room for newly generated organisms. I'll do some reading to see what other people say.
Now we are in the realm of evolution as described by Darwin. Survival has nothing to do with intention or purpose. If certain characteristics or behaviors make an organism more likely to survive than an organism without those characteristics or behavior, and if those characteristics or behaviors can be passed on genetically, the organism will be more likely to survive until it can reproduce and pass those characteristics or behaviors on to its offspring.
But again - the ability to survive, the will to survive, are not present in inorganic nature. There is nothing with a will to survive on Mars, unless Perserverance tells us otherwise. Organisms seek homeostasis, which is the tendency towards a stable equilibrium between interdependent elements, especially as maintained by physiological processes. So I’m arguing that even viruses embody an intention or purpose to survive, on a very simple level, which you don’t observe in anything inorganic.
Would I be right in guessing that is the sum total of your knowledge of that book ;-)
Do you think a bacterium has a "will to survive?" What does that even mean? It doesn't have a will to survive. It survives or it doesn't.
Yes, although I have read other writings that discuss the same issues. I have also spent a lot of time paying attention to my own personal experience self-consciousness.
Yes, I do. Of course, a bacterium doesn't *think* anything, or say 'oh shit I'm in trouble'. It's not a conscious being, or reflective, or intelligent. But it's a living organism, and living things are characterised by homeostasis. Note the action-verb in the definition of homeostasis: 'seeks equilibrium'.
Of course, it's not until evolution reaches the stage of h.sapiens that a real reflective and abstract consciousness was to develop. But all animals strive to survive, they make enormous efforts to do so, even the most basic. And that's something that no mineral or comet or rock or whatever can do.
That's precisely what is missing in the materialist/physicalist account of living organisms - it is the one attribute it can't recognise, because it's not directly observable. I think it's more the case that naturalism assumes that the 'will to survive' characterises organic life, it doesn't contemplate the ontological implications of that. (For a delightful essay on same, see Evolution and the Purposes of Life, Steve Talbott, The New Atlantis.)
There's a current NY Times article about coronaviruses. It notes that even now, science has trouble defining what a living being is. It notes that 'a rabbit' actually fails one of the accepted definitions of living organisms.
Quoting T Clark
The point about Thomas Nagel's book, is that (a) Nagel is a respected philosopher (rare breed) and (b) a professed atheist, with no Intelligent Design ax to grind. His 2012 book was one of a series of books by him on the very broad topic of the nature of conscious experience and its relation to the objective sciences. Mind and Cosmos was sarcastically derided as 'one of the most despised books of 2012' because it takes aim at the mainstream view, which Nagel calls 'neo-Darwinian materialism'. So it's a watershed book, in my view, although of course a lot of people will disagree. But it's worth the read, and so are many of the criticisms, both pro- and con- that it generated. (Ask me, I have them all bookmarked :-) )
So, to be consistent you'd also have to think a plant has a will to seek the sun. You've completely changed the meaning of the word "will." Here are some definitions:
So, you think bacteria decide and desire.
We can stop this. It's not as if I don't know what you are talking about. It's not as if I can't understand why you feel the way you do. I just think it is a misleading and non-productive way to look at consciousness.
Lao Tzu didn't even think people should be willful. Wu wei, action without acting, is acting without will. If I can do it, why can't a nematode?
@T Clark already pointed out that it may be due to the fact that the evolutionary stage is already saturated with complex self-sustaining life and there are dominating forces already present. The evolutionary analogue of the first-to-market phenomenon. Another idea I can come up with, is that it is easier to create symbiotic relationship and leech to or collaborate with other lifeforms then to go your own way. The only way that the stage can be reset and start anew is if some grand catastrophy destroys the present status-quo, such as a meteorite tosses itself to earth, or a multi-host viral pandemic kills the apex species.
Quoting Wayfarer
If by intention we mean complex multi-layered behavior, such as immediate reactions, situational tactical (i.e. modal) behavior, long-term strategic behavior, I am not sure that physicalists should oppose it. I wouldn't, with a physicalist hat on. What may appear controversial is why the behavior ends up being constructive to the sustenance of the organism. Why the intention is indeed directed towards life sustaining behavior. But considering that the spectrum of possible choices ultimately sorts into life-sustenance and life-cessation, I think that it is obvious that if life of both intentions (i.e. forms of complex strategic behavior patterns) proliferated at one point, the latter category would have become extinct, leaving the former to assume reign of our hereditary genetic chain.
Then by what means did you learn that...
Quoting Wayfarer
?
They can learn. As I said, I don’t think they’re capable of conscious intention or abstract ideation, but both ‘will’ and ‘intentionality’ have broader meanings than simply human will or conscious intention.
Quoting T Clark
Plants, like any living thing, exhibit homeostasis and metabolism, but they’re insentient. They can be differentiated from minerals, but they lack some of the capabilities of sentient creatures. If they have a ‘will’ it might be a metaphorical expression, however, they possess qualities and attributes that minerals don’t exhibit.
Quoting T Clark
Chinese philosophy doesn’t really have a bearing on these questions which really are peculiar to the modern West. I think Schopenhauer’s conception of ‘will’ as a universal striving or wanting is much nearer the mark. I suppose from the Taoist perspective, ‘non-doing’ is precisely the kind of antidote to suffering that Schopenhauer recommended, which is why he often refers to Eastern spirituality in his writings.
Quoting Isaac
I figure that other creatures are not so different to myself, whereas materialism wants to treat them, and me, as objects, saying that the sense of subject-hood can simply be eliminated.
No, they really don't. Sure, maybe chimpanzees can will and intend. I don't know. Not amoeba. You are redefining words for your own convenience.
Quoting Wayfarer
I've experienced will in both a Western and Taoist context. They are the same thing. I haven't read much Schopenhauer. Seems like you and he are messing with the language together. Since this is philosophy, I'll acknowledge that that's the way things are done. Confuse everyone by changing definitions whenever you please.
On the other hand, if you've redefined "will" and "intent," you've also redefined "consciousness," into something that has nothing to do with human self-awareness.
That's just describing the two positions. You said that something was missing from the materialist account that was not directly observable. I was asking you what that is. Is your answer that it's the "sense of subject-hood"? Presumably this is a feeling you have of some sort? So if I ask "Do you have a sense of subject-hood - yes [ ] , no [ ]" will I not have just measured it?
Indeed, the best hypothesis for abiogenesis seems to be the RNA world. It solves the chicken-and-egg problem in the DNA-proteins relationship characteristic of cellular life. Cellular life would come from a different, more elemental form of "molecular life", which prions and ribosomes would be remnants of. Where and when this RNA world happened is of course a question. The time between earth formation and the first proofs of photosynthesis on earth is a few hundred million years, perhaps too short for the slow development of cellular life from an RNA soup. Maybe the RNA world was not born on earth.
You're doubtless aware of 'eliminative materialism', right? in fact, you'd be one of the advocates of this school on this site, right? So what is it that 'eliminative materialism' seeks to eliimate? What does it deny the existence of? Why does Daniel Dennett say 'the hard problem' is actually a problem at all?
I'm not sure how any of that answers my question, but... The SEP has a better answer than any I could give (I've no qualifications in Philosophy).
But you'll have to explain the link between that and my question as I'm not seeing it.
Quoting Isaac
No - you haven't measured it. You will simply have to take my word for it. And that is what gives rise to those debates about 'philosophical zombies' - for all you know, I (or anyone) could be a simalcrum of a human being with no subjective experience whatever, but if I could answer 'yes' to that question, you'd have no way of knowing. (Myself, I think it's a silly argument, but people have it, I think you'll find reference to it in that very SEP article...no, it's here https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zombies/).
It is the 'subjective sense of being' that is the subject of David Chalmer's 'hard problem of consciousness'. Daniel Dennett claims that there is no such problem, and that the subjective sense of being is merely the illusory output of cellular mechanisms.
All measurements come with error margins. If measurements which might be false don't count as measurements then we can't measure anything!
OK.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yep, and I'm asking why you think it's not objectively measurable. All you've said so far is that any such measurement is prone to error, but that's true of all measurement.
I'm no philosopher, Wayfarer but the fact that science can't yet explain the origin or nature of consciousness to our satisfaction does not mean it won't and it doesn't mean we have to say, 'therefore a deity or supernatural realm exists'. That would be the fallacy from ignorance, surely?
The fact remains that there are no known cases of a mind without a brain. Conceptually it may well be that the experience of consciousness is the brain's equivalent of digestion - a neurobiological process - and our use of language and capacity for abstract concepts serves to create a series of confusions about categories. The kinds of confusions that lead idealists to be skeptical of naturalism.
Daniel Dennett may be a bore, but cognitive science has made way more progress in understanding the human mind than, say, Episcopalianism. It's early days and until there is evidence for a soul or some such dualist notion, let's not take it too seriously. The default setting in the absence of any evidence of supernatural forces is surely naturalism? For all the bad press naturalism gets, (and you are right that science is concerned with what is objectively measurable - should it be concerned with the subjectively immeasurable?) it is the only known way to acquire reliable knowledge about the world. That said, i am a methodological naturalist not a philosophical naturalist.
The denigration of the scientific method (by increasing numbers) reminds me of a lecture John Searle gave where he said, 'How can you send man to the moon and back and seriously wonder if reality exists, or is it really possible to make secure predictions using inductive reasoning."
Did I say that? And 'criticism' is not 'denigration', the fact that you read like that, that you immediately leap to both those conclusions - that says something.
Yet one of those those who made that voyage became an alcoholic, the other had a life-changing epiphany.
Funny, but so what?
Well, you are making the argument that there is a fatal gap in science, two really: abiogenesis and consciousness - is it not the case that these notions are traditionally the first steps in the contemporary advocacy for a supernatural realm?
When you speak of 'evidence' you're already assuming an empirical stance, when the nature of the question may be such that it can't be adjuticated by empirical means.
Any dualism that I would propose is not between mind and matter, but between measurement and meaning. It is our ability to discern meaning, which the Greeks called 'nous', misleadingly translated as 'intellect', which is the basis of, and prior to, all of the empirical sciences. It is not something 'out there somewhere'.
I know but - and I am serious about this line of questioning, I am not trolling - what else is there but evidence based knowledge? Can you demonstrate any other kind?
What possibly can the difference be between measurement and meaning in practical demonstration (and I recognise the irony in my question)?
The reason I pick Dennett, is because he follows to its logical conclusion the idea that all of life can be understood in wholly objective terms, that life really is the outcome of the 'collocation of atoms'. So I'm not 'attacking straw men', as he represents what has been called 'ultra-Darwinism' and so he throws the questions into stark relief.
Questions are seriously raised in modern academic philosophy, 'what function can consciousness really be said to fulfil?'
Quoting Tom Storm
Maths would be a good starting point.
But there are also many foundational axioms that are held without evidence. Scientific materialism is one. It is a metaphysical stance, not a testable hypothesis as evidenced by the fact that its proponents keep defending it, even while the scientific notion of matter is in constant flux.
That is something like the kind of thing Kuhn talks about in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. It's not as if you'll find 'empirical proof of something non-empirical', but questioning the assumptions that underlie empiricism, which is quite a hard thing to do.
BTW, the astronaut who had the life-changing experience was Edgar Mitchell, who founded the Institute of the Noetic Sciences. He's the one who had the epiphany on the voyage.
Well, since you brought up consciousness, my favorite topic...
My hypothesis is that qualia are the product of additive superposition amongst entangled wavicles. This generates layers of overlapping entanglement structures spanning many molecules that produce what I call coherence fields. Its basically a kind of quantum resonance analogous to the blending of shades in the visible light spectrum, except much more various and complex (including what is true subjective color). These resonances produce the experience of images, sounds, feels, all the basic sensations, which are organized within the modular mind, firmly attached to the brain in humans, such that self-awareness and meaning as we know them can exist.
If this is accurate, qualia are an emergent property of matter on par with shape and size, and qualitative experience or "what-it-is-like-to-be" emerges from large scale, complex modularization of this qualia-infused matter. The mind's qualia are not then an epiphenomenon, but just as causally fundamental as shape and size.
Qualia and qualitative experience in this account can exist in forms besides what we traditionally know as terrestrial biology, and this provides conceptual space for factors of preternatural spirituality and divinity to be considered as evolutionary influences, what I think is an argument you are making.
So the experience of meaning in all its dimensions can be measured as matter, but this matter contains elements of consciousness at a very basic level, to the extent that matter might be regardable as intrinsically psychical. I think this will resolve mind/body duality and the hard problem without eliminativist rejection of what has traditionally been considered phenomena of immaterial substance.
I've been skim reading this thread and (sorry if it is a derailment ) but want to pick up on something I had never heard of before.
Methodological naturalism v philosophical naturalism.
What are they and why is it important to make the distinction ?
I did a quick search and found this article:
https://infidels.org/library/modern/barbara_forrest/naturalism.html
The abstract:
Quoting Barbara Forrest
Perhaps this would need another thread to discuss.
It is somewhat beyond me but I would like to try and understand these positions.
Yes, I understand this and the logical absolutes are good examples too. There are many presuppositions we all need to make that cannot be justified. Reason is one. Do we go as far as to call them properly basic?
But even so, I fail to see how it gets us to a supernatural. It just tells us of our limitations. I know Christian apologists are fond of saying atheism is a self refuting philosophy (via the theological thinker Alvin Plantinga, and via Kant I suppose) and that materialism can't account for morality , etc. All hoary old favorite arguments.
But in the we can't get away from science being the only reliable source of knowledge, for all its limitations. Is there another source that can be demonstrated to be reliable? I don't believe we can get to ultimate certainty but seems to me that a multitude of sins are often crammed into any gaps we have in science, without any real quality control.
They are important because the first says it is not possible to gain reliable knowledge outside of using this method. The second, which I do not accept, is that all which is extant is natural subject to natural laws. We would need to demonstrate this before making that claim.
OK. That raises more questions. However, don't wish to spoil this thread by going off track.
I will do more research. Have already found some bedtime reading:
https://optimistminds.com/methodological-naturalism/#:~:text=%20Methodological%20Naturalism%20%201%20Philosophy%20meets%20science.,Naturalism%20must%20be%20differentiated%20from%20Ontological...%20More
‘Methodological naturalism’ excludes what can't be accounted for or conceived of in scientific (objective, quantifiable) terms. It is a perfectly sound methodological step. Philosophical naturalism goes further by saying that only those factors which can be considered scientifically are real. This is where scientific method tends towards 'scientism'.
Quoting Tom Storm
Significant again that 'the supernatural' comes up. The issue is actually the limitations of objectivity and the nature of living beings. I am arguing the view that an ontological distinction must be made between living things and inorganic nature. But naturalism is uncomfortable with ontological distinctions, because there is purportedly only one kind of substance, viz a viz, matter - or nowadays matter~energy, which complicates things a bit. But nevertheless that is the tacit understanding of nearly everyone, as per this:
Quoting T Clark
So, the suggestion that living organisms can't be wholly understood through the objective sciences implies 'the supernatural'!
The way I approach it, is not to say that there are 'non-material things' - which is oxymoronic - but to point out that 'the subject' is out of scope for the objective sciences as a matter of definition. This goes right back to the formation of modern scientific method with Newton, Galileo and Descartes. The underlying methodology is to 'bracket out' the observing mind, so as to arrive at precise mathematical descriptions of the 'primary qualities' of entities described according to the methods of algebraic geometery. This 'new science' was held to have universal scope - which indeed it does, but only of what can successfully treated as an object of analysis. And the mind, or more broadly, being itself, cannot be treated that way, as we can never stand outside of it or make an object out of it. This is also a problem that has made itself clear through the observer problem or measurement problem in physics.
Have a peruse of the core of Mind and Cosmos
Quoting Tom Storm
I think reason is indeed 'properly basic', and also that it can't be accounted for naturalistically.
Quoting Enrique
That seems pseudo-science to me, and plainly dualistic, to boot.
Unfortunately, that was what was is being done when Evolutionary Theory is taught as fact in schools. Just filling in a huge hole, the size of the Grand Canyon.
I'd need know more about where you would take the notion of 'non-material things' because this can be a bit slippery. You hint/highlight that I keep coming back to the theme of the supernatural, or dualism or a superphysical proposal as some kind of unthinking, reactive blurt. Yes, you are partly right.
Because generally this is exactly where people go with these ideas. Maybe not you... By definition, if you say there are 'things which exist that are not verifiable as things' you heading towards a supernatural proposition, surely? Apologies to quantum theory, by the way. Can your non-material things be used to make predictions?
The more crassly expressed version of similar notions might be: 'There is a limit to science; therefore Jesus.' or Aliens. It can also lead to a kind of language game. A revived version of idealism proffered that studiously avoids talking about God in a deliberate way, but is clearly used as a foundation for some form of theism or prime mover - even Tillich's Ground of Being, say.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, agree. I've referenced this problem before and am quite partial to the idea. With a correspondence theory of truth it is argued you can't survey the relation between the evidence (say) and the reality. But is this just a confusion generated by conceptual language?
I see it in terms of cultural dynamics. Secular culture wants to believe the whole matter is settled, that God is not only dead, but buried. It's a neat little box with ribbon tied around it, RIP. So whenever anything comes up that calls this into question, then yipes! What are you saying!
I will make no apologies for being generally on the theistic or idealist side of the ledger. I view today's secular philosophy as parasitical on the body of Western philosophy proper, which is likewise generally idealist, I contend. I'm well familiar with Marxist, atomistic, scientific and naturalistic arguments for atheism, and I don't think any of them stack up. What is neglected is that science itself doesn't explain the 'laws' or principles or regularities it has discovered. It assumes those laws, but it has no idea why f=ma. Nor does it need to know that. It all works fine, without knowing that. But, as Wittgenstein said, 'the whole modern conception of the world is founded on the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena'.
But it's not like I'm trying to 'sneak God into the picture'. I've never not believed in God, but the God I believe in has nothing in common with the God that atheists reject. They seem to imagine some super-being, a cosmic director who calls the shots and metes out punishment. I've never accepted that picture. Furthermore, as one who never beleved that religious scriptures were literally true, the fact that they're not literally true has no especial significance in my mind, despite the fact that it seems profoundly important to many atheists. (In that sense, they're kind of 'reverse fundamentalists').
Getting back to origin of life. We like to think of it very much as a kind of large-scale chemical reaction - that the right ingredients come together in some highly dynamic environment, and that this gives rise to the process of replication which is at the origin of life. I sometimes fantisize that if we could zoom Attenborough back 2 or 3 billions years, we could see him standing there, probably in a space-suit, pointing to some black smudges in tidal ponds, and intoning, 'and here we see the ancestors of every plant and animal that will evolve in the next 3 billion years'. And I think that's correct, it's exactly what did happen. But we assume from this that 'mind' is 'the product' of this process. But what if there is an incipient or latent tendency towards mind that exists throughout the Cosmos, and this is the way that it manifests. 'What is latent becomes patent', as my lecturer in Indian philosophy used to say. So you can see the emergence of life as the way in which the Universe itself discovers new horizons of being, horizons that would never be realised in the absence of living beings. 'Nagel’s starting point is not simply that he finds materialism partial or unconvincing, but that he himself has a metaphysical view or vision of reality that just cannot be accommodated within materialism. This vision is that the appearance of conscious beings in the universe is somehow what it is all for; that ‘Each of our lives is a part of the lengthy process of the universe gradually waking up and becoming aware of itself’.
Whereas, we nowadays think that the mind is the by-product of an essentially accidental and meaningless process. That is what gives rise to a great deal of the nihilism and anomie that typifies modern life. But seeing mind as fundamental totally reverses the perspective. I suppose you could classify that as a form of 'religious naturalism', and I'd go along with that, but it's miles away from the current scientific consensus.
I like how your mind works but I guess (in case you hadn't guessed) we come to different conclusions on these issues. The devil is in the detail with all belief systems. Most atheists are battling against the vast mobilized army of literalists so they have no choice but to pitch the discussion at a vulgar level. Religion pitched at a vulgar level is harmful to human beings.
I don't think anyone should apologize for being an idealist as long as robust critical thinking has been undertaken to arrive at the position.
It's also easy to misread atheists. Most atheists I know don't concern themselves with believers who are progressive and have a sophisticated theology. Tillich or Bentley Hart's Gods are not worth contesting and ultimately do not contribute to life denying, bigotries and superstations that cause real harm in communities. Are they even theists?
There are many shoddy, untheorized atheists who are convinced theism can be disproven and that science has answered everything. There are atheists who believe in astrology and idealism. All a responsible atheist can say is there is no good reason to accept the preposition that a god exists. The idea hasn't met its burden of proof. And for any other proposition there ought to be a good reason. But certainty on anything is not possible. I understand that your epistemology doesn't appreciate this kind of frame.
However for me what matters is actually how people relate to their fellow creatures. The real test of a belief system is not how much 'metaphysics' or anti-realism it holds, but what it looks like in action in the world.
Panspermia is actually a widely-accepted theory. The possibility at least.
Quoting Tom Storm
But how did their life evolve? Earth is just a circumstantial prop in this debate of the origin of life (organism from the non-organic).
What about additive superposition amongst entangled wavicles or "quantum resonance" seems like pseudoscience? Its a testable hypothesis regarding a possibly observable property of matter. Simply the idea of hybridized wavelengths generated by interpenetrating quantum fields, with implications for spiritual aspects of evolution.
I know mine is a minority view.
Quoting Tom Storm
:up: totally agree. You gotta walk the walk. To me it’s a matter of trying to find that source, the ‘wellspring in the heart’. There are times it seems nearby, other times it seems impossible.
Quoting Tom Storm
The culture is much more polarised in America. I think fundamentalists and atheists are like mirror-images in some ways. I have noticed that the ‘vulgar theists’ associated with the ID movement will accuse the likes of Hart of being atheist; by their lights I’d probably be counted as atheist also.
Quoting Enrique
It’s more a matter of whether the subjective reality of being can be explained in any kind of objective terms. What has to be understood is the dynamics of objectification, of how the mind seeks to objectify and then understand in those terms. Which is perfectly understandable in the domain of science and engineering, but this is a different kind of question.
How do you know that an alien from an alien cosmos are bound by rules of cause and effect? Any technology sufficiently advanced will look like magic to us. Any belief can be defended and if it looks dumb to you and me, our views look dumb to others. No different to the notion that God is a magic man and is exempt from cause and effect.
"Discern" presupposes that meaning already exists.
"Attribute" does not.
:wink:
I do want to make one thing clear, in case I've been misleading - I believe there are legitimate, non-scientific ways to know the world. Most of the ways we know the world are not science based or even rational.
Quoting Wayfarer
I disagree with this.
Have a geez at the Wikipedia entry on nous https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nous#Aristotle. I’m sure there’s something in this - something that has been forgotten, not proved to be incorrect.
For folk like me who are working on a computer that is pretty much useless aside from being able to access this particular site, you'll have to provide a different link(compatible to pre chrome days I guess?) or copy and paste the part you want me to review.
:worry:
Think of it, how convenient and thus unlikely that life should give up its secrets - what it actually is - to a man/woman with just a simple microscope? Cells are microscopic features of living organisms and though they do appear roughly brick-like as if living organisms are like houses built of them, I still question the conclusion that cells are, well, it!
To illustrate my point I offer an analogy and I suppose it'll fulfill its purpose of getting the message across. If you look at the biosphere, most of the action - life - takes place at the boundary between air and the earth i.e. life seems to like the interface between the atmosphere and the lithosphere. The air itself and the ground itself are relatively lifeless. Likewise, I imagine life to be that which is between cells, where cell membranes or cell walls meet and definitely not inside of cells. It's a kinda Buddhist take on biology - we feel a cup is the empty space but the actual "stuff" is the wall of material that surrounds the space. :joke:
Roger that!
Quoting Wayfarer
It is describable though. I’m more familiar with Zahavi’s phenomenologically- based pre-reflective awareness than Nagel’s notion of the feeling of what is is like to be aware. In Zahavi’s case , this subjective felt sense never stands alone but always as one side of a subject’s intentional relation to objects. And thus it is not an essence or category but an aspect or pole. He describes it as like a source of light that , along with illuminating everything that falls within its scope , renders itself visible as well.
I’m wondering , how would you articulate the difference between the religious and the atheistic account of pre-reflective self -awareness , the ‘feeling of what it is like’?
There was a remark made in another thread:
Quoting Tom Storm
I would say it is the assumption of modern, post-Enlightenment thought that ‘the world’ is what exists independently of our cognition of it, and that it would persist in much the same way even if mankind were wiped out by a catastrophe. Basically that is simple realism.
What this doesn’t see, is what the mind brings in order to make such judgements, even the judgement of what the world must be in the absence of observers. I say it is meaningless to contemplate a world as if seen from no point-of-view, as the very fabric of time and space itself has a subjective pole. But the ‘subjective pole’ itself is never an object of analysis - obviously - which is why the ultimate tendency of materialism is to deny that the subjective has any reality whatever because it is not disclosed objectively - which is how you get to the view of eliminative materialism.
With your research interests, you will probably know about the confluence of Buddhist philosophy - abhidharma - and phenomenology which is at the basis of the ‘embodied cognition’ approach from the book, The Embodied Mind. One of the current theorists in this approach is Michel Bitbol, who has said:
That is what I’m criticising.
Quoting Joshs
Hard to say. Schopenhauer is often held up as an atheist but he seemed to have a very high regard for religious asceticism and Eastern religions. He was said to read the Upanisads every night. Buddhism itself, particular early Buddhism, is known for its principled atheism, but it nevertheless explicitly rejects materialism as a form of nihilism. There was a character in the early Buddhist texts, a Prince Payasi, who represents the carvakas, the materialists of Buddha’s day - not so different from modern materialists, allowing for the historical context.
I guess what I’m saying is even simple creatures are subjects of experience - they’re beings. And so they can’t be fully understood by the same laws that govern inanimate matter. It’s kind of patronising, in a way. You’re not allowing them the dignity of being, you’re simply assuming that according to your science, you know all about them.
[quote=The Guardian, Obituary of Timothy Sprigge, Idealist Philosopher] Panpsychism (as he argues in his major work, The Vindication Of Absolute Idealism, 1983), has an ethical upshot - enabling, and requiring, us to empathise with other humans and animals. It "bids us recognise that what looks forth from another's eyes, what feels itself in the writhing of a worm . . . is really that very thing which, when speaking through my lips, calls itself 'I'." [/quote]
The Vedantins would agree.
I don't disagree with most of what you say but I don't think it makes an impact on the efficacy of methodological realism as the only useful tool we have for determining the nature of our experience.
I know that Heidegger would phrase this differently , and I think so would Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. For Heidegger, Being isnt ‘a’ being, a subject, in the Kantian sense of a formal content. It is the in-between of subjectivity and objectivity, so neither the subjective nor the objective pole can be ‘measured’ except in relation to each other. That is why he rejected humanism, which wants to see subjectivity as a kind of standing reserve. For Husserl the self , in the form of the ego, has no substantive content in itself, other than being a kind of zero point of noetic-noematic correlations. It seems to me the religious impulse is to locate a transcendent content or vector or telos in subjectivity, which is associated in some grounding way with the good, while the phenomenologists see the good as a relative subject-object construction.
It depends on what aspect of our experience you have in mind. Our natural sciences don’t seem to suffer from their dependence on realism, but then that’s probably because these fields have yet to produce an alternative to compare it to ( but they will eventually).
As far as the social sciences are concerned it is a different story, especially in psychology. Here we do have post-realist alternatives in hermeneutic, enactivist , constructivist, social constructionist, and phenomenological approaches. These accounts recognize that one can maintain naturalism while jettisoning realism.
You are. I'm not. I'm asking you why you think it's unmeasurable in principle. Specifically I'm asking you in what way a verbal report that you feel it does not constitute a measurement of it.
You will have to provide a simple example. If you're simply talking theory then this is largely inconsequential.
Thanks, Wayfarer, for this further information. I have yet to read up on some of the internet sources.
I am following this thread with more interest than I thought I would, given that I am not always attracted to threads with anything scientific in the title.
In particular, the conversation between yourself and @Tom Storm. Here:
Quoting Tom Storm
and now @Joshs to Tom:
Quoting Joshs
Quoting Joshs
Tom responds:
Quoting Tom Storm
I agree that more examples would be useful as to the practical consequences of holding any of the positions previously discussed.
Question:
What would be an example of
: 'the efficacy of methodological realism as the only useful tool we have for determining the nature of our experience' in everyday life ?
With reference to the human experience as it tries to come to terms with what we know today.
I think that recognising the importance of the mind to the self, as it functions and not worrying about how it came to be, is perhaps of more relevance to the development of the self - perhaps even in an evolutionary or revolutionary way ?
I agree with:
Quoting Tom Storm
So, back to 'naturalism'. I will have to give this, or 'methodological realism' more thought and time, given that it seems to be at the core of it all ?
Quoting Tom Storm
I question the conclusion. I think 'scientific realism' is a useful stance in asking scientific questions. But 'the nature of our experience' is another matter altogether. Reflecting on the nature of experience I would take to be more the subject of philosophy. Discovering the nature of phenomena is more the domain of science.
Quoting Amity
A point I would make is that the kind of self-knowledge that philosophy wants to impart doesn't necessarily require any special scientific apparatus. I would say that the aim of philosophy, generally, is to attain a state of equilibrium and disinterestedness, to enable you to always act as the situation calls for and to realise your true purpose, whatever that is. That doesn't require any particular science, although your purpose might be in the scientific domain. Aristotle distinguished episteme, which is what we would now call science, from both techne, which is the application of a skill, and phronesis, which is practical wisdom. Sure, science is indispensable, but without self-knowledge and practical wisdom it can be put to diabolical ends. Good people can be good scientists, but being a good scientist doesn't necessarily make you a good person.
Quoting Amity
I have never heard the expression 'methodological realism' until now. Methodological naturalism is the usual expression. And to recap, where I think that overshoots is when it is extended to grand claims about the nature of existence. I think it's very important to understand intellectual history and the forces that came into play through the Enlightenment, which is a big subject, but indispensable in my view.
In respect of evolutionary biology, this has come to be seen as the kind of scientific rebuttal of religious creation myths. That's obviously true in some ways, but there are many open questions about the meaning of evolution, which actually converge with questions about the meaning of life. That is what I take the last paragraph of the OP to be getting at.
Tom seems to have moved to that instead of his previous 'methodological naturalism' ?
On methodological realism:
Quoting Ilkka Niiniluoto
OK. Thanks for that and the general overview.
Quoting Wayfarer
Last paragraph of OP:
Quoting Gary Enfield
1. 'The mystery of the origin of life is very real' - no argument with that from me.
Although some accept it as a result of faith v those who prefer knowledge, even if limited.
Doubt can still be present in both. Sometimes, this troubles the faithful and an amount of guilt is felt.
Whereas, others can see doubt as helpful and a way forward.
As for 2. and 3. that is beyond me !
My only thought, right now, is that energy plays a part...resulting in the eventual energetic pursuits of humans and others to keep on going, or not - as the case might be. Could be seen as trivial in some respects if you think there is something greater out there...
Most try to find reasons to go on, even in the most difficult of circumstances, including real doubt.
And they do this without recourse to studies or theories in philosophy or science...or religion.
Perhaps they are better for it ?
Science is not unquestionable and empiricism does not axiomatically exhaust all that we can call our experience. But at least we are compelled to science by more impeding necessities. I realize that you can claim that the need for purpose and origin are similar to some extent, but science renders their existence suspicious not just by its exploration of the inanimate universe, but also because it conveys to us about our mental fragility and our addiction to self-affirmation. Those higher-order needs might turn out to be vanities. That is why, one needs to be skeptical.
Even if our cerebral motivations to ask the questions are vain, that does automatically mean that the questions are non-sensical,
But there is a wide range of possible answers. And it seems to me that theism is cherry picking them. The "endemic reason" might be just some narrow range of experience and in the grand scheme of things it might mean nothing. That is absurdism. Or the universe might be all the explanation there is. It might be its own reason. But even if you cannot accept absurdism, because it appears counter-anecdotal to any experience that you have with the universe, this still leaves the question - do you accept any ecocentric (i.e. non-antropocentric) or self-denigrating forms of theism - dystheism, panpsychism, pandeism, etc. To me, it appears that most theists are comparatively optimistic. Why? Isn't that indication for bias?
The need to assume a "supernatural" is produced by the materialist tendency to dissolve the division between the natural and the artificial. When we maintain this division, we see that the artificial is created by intention, and the natural is not, and there is no need to invoke a supernatural. But when the intentional, the artificial, is conceived of as being a feature of the natural (such as emergence), rather than the inverse, which is to see "the natural" as a category created and produced by the intentional human mind, then "the natural" becomes fundamentally unsupported. This produces the need to assume a supernatural to provide substance for the reality of the natural.
I like to look at reality as a staircase rather than a ramp. Like a staircase there are "jumps" in the nature of phenomena instead of smooth progressions like on a ramp. I've identified two such "jumps: 1. inanimate to animate and 2. non-human life to humans. The first "jump" is what's been troubling biologists all this time and needs no introduction. The second jump too is well-known and it was recognized very early on in human history as by the likes of Aristotle who defined humans as rational animals.
I say all this only from what I can intuit from my general knowledge which sadly ain't that much. A question to you: what exactly is the difference between the living and the non-living? When I ask this question to myself I draw a blank - nothing springs to mind as if I don't really know the difference between the inanimate and the animate. It seems I'm not alone in this though as the question "what is life?" posed to biologists elicits responses that are marked by an equal degree of ignorance and that's ironic since they've constructed a whole corpus of knowledge which they claim is about life. Perhaps, as it appears to be, we know what life isn't but are uncertain of what life is. That should be good enough for government work.
The next thing I want discuss is what you've labeled as "experience". All I can comment is that the way the non-living and the living encounter the world should be different, that difference being a correlate of the presence/absence of a "life force" if I may be allowed some leeway here to use that phrase.
This difference is, at the human scale, what the hard problem of consciousness is all about. Am I right to interpret your beliefs in this way or am I barking up the wrong tree?
You mean psychoanalytic theory, S-R theory and cognitive behavioral theory are also inconsequential, or did you mean that it would be difficult for you to assess the practical usefulness of a theory you are unfamiliar with without some examples of how it is put into practice? Rogers’a client centered therapy, Gendlin’s focusing and George Kelly’s personal construct therapy are some examples of post-realist psychotherapeutic approaches. Francisco Varela and Evan Thompson have a applied post-realist framework to perceptual and consciousness research, and Matthew Ratcliffe uses this perspective in his model of affectivity and his studies of schizophrenia , depression, ptsd, grief, etc.
You can check out Jan Slaby’s
research group in Germany for a post-realist model of neuroscience. Or look at Shaun Gallagher’s post -realist accounts of thought-insertion and his critique of theory of mind accounts of autism.
From Wiki:
“Enactivism argues that cognition arises through a dynamic interaction between an acting organism and its environment.[1] It claims that the environment of an organism is brought about, or enacted, by the active exercise of that organism's sensorimotor processes."The key point, then, is that the species brings forth and specifies its own domain of problems ...this domain does not exist "out there" in an environment that acts as a landing pad for organisms that somehow drop or parachute into the world. Instead, living beings and their environments stand in relation to each other through mutual specification or codetermination." p 198[2] "Organisms do not passively receive information from their environments, which they then translate into internal representations. Natural cognitive systems...participate in the generation of meaning ...engaging in transformational and not merely informational interactions: they enact a world."[3] These authors suggest that the increasing emphasis upon enactive terminology presages a new era in thinking about cognitive science.”
Abiogenesis and evolution are entirely different processes. Evolutionary theory says nothing about the origins of life, only how life has changed over time. Abiogenesis describes the mechanisms by which life came from non-living matter.
Quoting Wayfarer
I agree that there are important, completely non-scientific ways of understanding consciousness and experience and science that doesn't recognize that is scientism. But when people talk about "the hard problem of consciousness," they are generally talking about consciousness as a scientific issue. It is perfectly possible to study consciousness on a purely scientific basis. Something is lost, left out when you do that.
Do you mean "mystery" as in stuff we don't know yet or as in stuff that requires some special way of knowing? Or maybe stuff that is unknowable?
Quoting TheMadFool
That seems like a much stronger statement than what I understand @Wayfarer to be saying, but I'll let him speak for himself.
Quoting TheMadFool
This is misleading. The classification of what is living and what is not may have some ambiguity in it, e.g. viruses, but that's true of most distinctions. We biologists, and we, generally know what is meant when we say "living."
That would be the realist position , which starts from the belief that the hard problem really is a problem rather
than a result of a dualist metaphysics. For the realist , all that is lost by studying consciousness is some ineffable subjective quality, like a spice that can be added or removed at will.
As Evan Thompson writes:
“ “Many philosophers have argued that there seems to be a gap between the objective, naturalistic facts of the world and the subjective facts of conscious experience. The hard problem is the conceptual and metaphysical problem of how to bridge this apparent gap. There are many critical things that can be said about the hard problem (see Thompson&Varela, forthcoming), but what I wish to point out here is that it depends for its very formulation on the premise that the embodied mind as a natural entity exists ‘out there' independently of how we configure or constitute it as an object of knowledge through our reciprocal empathic understanding of one other as experiencing subjects. One way of formulating the hard problem is to ask: if we had a complete, canonical, objective, physicalist account of the natural world, including all the physical facts of the brain and the organism, would it conceptually or logically entail the subjective facts of consciousness? If this account would not entail these facts, then consciousness must be an additional, non-natural property of the world.
One problem with this whole way of setting up the issue, however, is that it presupposes we can make sense of the very notion of a single, canonical, physicalist description of the world, which is highly doubtful, and that in arriving (or at any rate approaching) such a description, we are attaining a viewpoint that does not in any way presuppose our own cognition and lived experience. In other words, the hard problem seems to depend for its very formulation on the philosophical position known as transcendental or metaphysical realism. From the phenomenological perspective explored here, however — but also from the perspective of pragmatism à la Charles Saunders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, as well as its contemporary inheritors such as Hilary Putnam (1999) — this transcendental or metaphysical realist position is the paradigm of a nonsensical or incoherent metaphysical viewpoint, for (among other problems) it fails to acknowledge its own reflexive dependence on the intersubjectivity and reciprocal empathy of the human life-world.“
Good question.
I don't know what @Gary Enfield meant by it. I should have asked before agreeing !
I had assumed ( sue me ! ) that it was stuff not possible to understand or explain right now.
We don't know.
Is there a likelihood of us gaining that knowledge in the future ?
Qui sait ?
* Gallic shrug *
I suppose I like to think anything is possible but...
What do you think ?
Just that theories like these, for the most part, are imprecise, interpreted variously and lacking in precision. CBT or DBT has application in some instances to help change behaviour but it is not a robust epistemology.
All I am saying is that the scientific method remains the single most reliable pathway to truth. Can you name an alternative that can provide us with reliable knowledge about the world?
True. I would never say science is good. Just reliable. I would not say science is certain. Just reliable.
But the question of goodness or virtue is too complex and elusive to ever attach to any particular discipline or activity. It is equally true that being a good believer or philosopher does not necessarily make you a good person.
I would also not make a necessary connection between the pursuit of spirituality or philosophy with self knowledge either. It could just as readily be self-deception.
I like this Thompson guy, even though he's got it all wrong. At least he lays out the problems clearly. As a great philosopher once said - Clarity is so rare and unexpected, it is often mistaken for truth. I'm going to jiggle around with what he says above to make it match the way I see things:
There are many critical things that can be said about [objective reality], but it depends for its very formulation on the premise that [reality] exists ‘out there' independently of how we configure or constitute it as an object of knowledge.
That was fun.
Quoting Joshs
Hey, this Thompson guy is ok. Maybe I don't disagree with him after all.
"Truth" is generally defined as congruence with objective reality. I will agree that science is very good at identifying the truth in that sense. There's a good argument to be made that objective reality is a human construct which boils down to that which can be perceived, conceived, and understood by humans. That has been discussed many times in the forum. Getting into that would require shanghaiing the original post.
There are ways of knowing the world that do not require an objective reality.
What are you thinking?
Quoting T Clark
Yes, it is pretty tedious and there is no consensus on this.
Quoting T Clark
'Correspondence' is probably a better word and comes with a venerable if much attacked theory.
You're aware of the phrase 'the hermeneutics of suspicion'? What if the motivation of this criticism arises not from science per se, but from the 'Enlightenment values' which seek to objectify and instrumentalise.
Quoting simeonz
'Cosmos is all there is' saith Carl Sagan. But this is again just scientism speaking - 'cosmos' means 'an ordered whole', and that concept can hardly be maintained in modern cosmology, which according to some critics is Lost in Math.
Quoting TheMadFool
It's one of those questions, like, 'what is the nature of time', which seems obvious until you try and answer it. I mentioned a NY Times article on the Corona Virus which points out how difficult it is to define the difference precisely. If all those white coats can't work it out, buggered if I will be able to.
Philosophically, I claim an ontological distinction can be discerned between mineral, plant, animal, and rational beings. That harks back to the 'great chain of being' which is not favoured by modern thinking.
But there is some support for at least the first distinction in current science:
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsta.2015.0060
Quoting T Clark
Through subjects including cognitive science and psychology, although there will always be a controversy about the degree to which psychology is real science. And what these approaches 'leaves out' is precisely the subject of Chalmer's paper, 'Facing up to the Hard Problem of Consciousness'.
Quoting Tom Storm
Delusion and self-deception are certainly pitfalls in any spiritual path. It doesn't mean that there isn't a path to follow.
Quoting Joshs
What they're arguing is that the 'hard problem of consciousness' arises from an artificial distinction. And it does! That is the point. It is implicit in post-Cartesian dualism with its division of mind and body.
[quote=Thomas Nagel, Mind & Cosmos, Pp35-36]The modern mind-body problem arose out of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, as a direct result of the concept of objective physical reality that drove that revolution. Galileo and Descartes made the crucial conceptual division by proposing that physical science should provide a mathematically precise quantitative description of an external reality extended in space and time, a description limited to spatiotemporal primary qualities such as shape, size, and motion, and to laws governing the relations among them. Subjective appearances, on the other hand -- how this physical world appears to human perception -- were assigned to the mind, and the secondary qualities like color, sound, and smell were to be analyzed relationally, in terms of the power of physical things, acting on the senses, to produce those appearances in the minds of observers. It was essential to leave out or subtract subjective appearances and the human mind -- as well as human intentions and purposes -- from the physical world in order to permit this powerful but austere spatiotemporal conception of objective physical reality to develop. (pp. 35-36)[/quote]
Their criticism applies equally to this general picture, it is true. But it is that general picture that Chalmers' criticism is addressing.
Phew. Enough already.
Never said there was not, only that we can't assert it is ipso facto better than naturalism.
But it seeks answers that naturalism cannot. That's where the division really lies. According to naturalism, h. sapiens is another species, a natural occurence. According to the perennial philosophies East and West, h. sapiens is something more than, or other than, that. Man - I'll use 'man' in the old sense, which means 'being' and is not gender specific - embodies a spiritual aspect which transcends nature.
But [s]of course[/s] our culture has successfully innoculated us against that understanding.
If we take Aristotle's perspective, described in "De Anima", On the Soul, the difference is found in the capacities, or powers of the soul, potentia. A living thing is defined by a soul, which is a principle of actuality, or activity. This is similar to vitalism. The living being, by virtue of having a soul, may have a range of different capacities, ranging through self-nutrition, self subsistence, self-movement, sensation, and intellection. The different capacities are understood as residing in the material aspect of the living body. The non-living, lacking a soul as a principle of activity, cannot be said to have these various capacities, which though they reside in the material body are properties of the soul.
Not that you meant this, perhaps, but isn't the tendency to use this word 'scientism' usually a patronizing label? Is applying it to Sagan useful?
Given you are pretty much an atheist (from our pervious conversation), as far as more literalist theists may be concerned, what benefits do you believe your worldview brings, which are not available to the person who thinks the scientific method is the only reliable pathway to truth available to us at the moment?
Forgive the crude summary and feel free to correct me - it sometimes seems to me that you are saying you have greater innate sensitivity because you know that the universe has more in it than matter. My question is where (in general terms) do your presuppositions actually lead you?
Since when is the ‘scientific method’ not itself a worldview.? More accurately put, is there any such thing as THE scientific method? A quick glance at the history of philosophy of science shows that science’s understanding of its methods and practices has undergone many shifts over the past centuries. Your particular understanding of the methods of science and their significance and justification belongs to a particular
philosophy of science( a realist , Popperian one), as opposed to a post -realist philosophy of science along the lines of Kuhn, Feyerabend and science studies writers like Joseph Rouse. I suppose one way to define scientism is the mistaken belief that one particular interpretation of the role and methods of science is the one true interpretation.
Science is just a tool we can use that has demonstrated consistent reliability and its findings can be replicated or reviewed and perhaps found wanting. It probably never arrives at a final revelation, unlike say, organized religion.
Happy for you to enter into meta-discussion of science's alleged worldview al la Feyerabend, with whom I quite agree that science can go too far in its claims and it can be badly used, like any tool. Although I note that people like Feyeraband are quite pleased to seek evidence based medical treatment when sick, rather than a prayer group.
If you are going to say science is a worldview, fine. So is everything, from medicine to sport. But some worldviews are more helpful than others.
I'll take a swing at this. @Wayfarer and I don't agree on a lot, but I think we share some views and values in this area. I'm a civil engineer. That means, when there is some work to be done, I find out what our client wants, get a survey, do some calculations, make a drawing or two, then get a bunch of bulldozers and knock everything down. That works, to the extent it does, because we follow the typical materialist route of separating our area of interest from the rest of the universe and pretending what we do inside the area doesn't have anything to do with what goes on outside. Yes, I'm oversimplifying the process.
This leads to all sorts of problems. Is there another way, sure - look at the world, forgive me, holistically. As one unified system. There are sciences that do things that way - ecology, geology, evolutionary biology, hydrogeology. Observational rather than experimental sciences.
Now I feel bad that I threw a difficult question at you. Anyway, it was worth getting your opinion on the matter.
How about this: Since defining life reductively as a chemical process or even in terms of physics is problematic and other approaches to life are equally unsatisfactory, isn't it worth exploring other alternatives?
For instance, life could be defined in terms of intent - that's the closest concept to what I have in mind. All life seems to exhibit intent, living organisms seem to want to do something as opposed to following the normal course of events either chemically or in a physics sense. What I'm getting at is in some sense encapsulated in the expression "a life of its own."
This is only an attempt at a sensible definition of life and, for better or worse, it doesn't seem possible to reduce this notion of life to chemistry or physics.
Ok, holistically is fine - many disciplines that can come together usefully, based around evidence and demonstrable results. If it is observational, it is still part of the extant material world, so technically it is physical and measurable. But where someone says there is a supernatural explanation for a physical phenomenon, I would want demonstrated evidence that this is the case. It is a simple thing.
I am quite certain that science hasn't and perhaps can't explain everything. But the time to believe in a proposition is when there is evidence for it.
I don't think @Wayfarer was talking about supernatural phenomena. We'll let him respond.
Wayfarer doesn't really say where his ideas may lead, hence my earlier question. I am simply introducing this as part of the discussion as it is an obvious potential direction. But happy to be told it isn't relevant by W or you.
I would modify that statement to read: science is a word which points to a historically developing progression of worldviews rather than a single worldview, changing in tandem with other aspects of culture. Thus we can speak of Enlightenment , modernist and postmodernist eras of science, literature,art, philosophy, etc. It is the pragmatic usefulness of the larger cultural worldview informing and defining the science of a given era that determines its helpfulness. So I agree that’s some
worldviews are more helpful than others. For instance Popper’s Kantian-inspired modernist view of science as falsificationism is more helpful than Bacon’s Enlightenment hypothetical -indicative definition. And I think Kuhn and Feyerabend’s postmodern view of science is more helpful that Popper’s modernist worldview.
It has been said that modem physics is an instantiation .of a modernist worldview whereas Newtonian physics represented an Enlightenment worldview. The attempt to bring irreversible temporality into the center of physics by researchers like Lee Smolen may indicate the beginnings of a shift of physics into a postmodern science.
The shifts of worldview within the history of psychology can also be noted. Jerry Fodor, one of cognitivism's leading and most eloquent exponents, said that "In intellectual history, everything happens twice, first as philosophy and then as cognitive science.". He added that the only respect in which first generation cognitivism is a major advance over eighteenth- and nineteenth-century representationism is in its use of the computer. Enactivist approaches in cognitive
science represent a shift in worldview within the field
away from modernist realism and representationalism , and in the direction of postmodern intersubjectivity.
Someday, in another discussion, we can discuss how God is involved in all this, because it is. But, no, I am not, and I don't think Wayfarer is, talking about anything supernatural.
I did mention that:
Quoting Wayfarer
But do read the passage I quoted from Barbieri again, he makes a great point about the ontological distinction between life and non-life, in scientific terms.
Quoting Tom Storm
'Scientism' is a bit of a boo-word, but some genuinely do espouse it, and Sagan is one. And hey, I really like Sagan, his 60's TV shows and popular writings are fabulous. He has a very nimble imagination, a warm personality, and that sonorous voice. I liked some of his books, especially Contact and Dragons of Eden. But he did sometimes stray into 'scientism'. Richard Lewontin, a biologist, in a review of one of his last books, A Demon-Haunted World, offered this often-quoted paragraph (NY Review of Books, 1/7/97):
[quote=Richard Lewontin]Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism.
It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated.
Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen. [/quote]
I think that quote says a lot. One of the things I think it says is that, to all intents, for this kind of thinking, science *is* a religion. Hence, 'the religion of scientism'. (And besides, 'believing in God' certainly DOES NOT mean you can 'believe in anything', one of the cogent criticisms of theological reasoning is that it is so circumscribed by dogma. It just means, you accept principles which scientific method has no way of validating.)
Quoting Tom Storm
I'm just a regular person - a 'bombu', in Japanese Buddhist parlance. But I am compelled to follow this path, hence the nickname! I think anyone on a spiritual path has a sense of trying to navigate to a higher destiny.
Quoting T Clark
Valuable point! What I think 'scientific materialism' is, is simply the attempt to apply this methodology to the problems of philosophy. That is very much what logical positivism is like, also. Of course, scientific method produces innummerable material benefits (not least for instance vaccines). So I would never criticize scientific methodology or engineering skill when it's applied to those innummerable subjects that benefit from it.
But when it strays into philosophy then it attempts to pronounce on subjects it has no hold over.
Quoting T Clark
Again, I think our culturally-approved ideas of what is 'natural' and what is 'supernatural' are somewhat artificial. St Augustine said that 'miracles are not against nature, they're against what we understand about nature'. And as one of the other more spiritually-inclined posters on this forum used to point out, 'metaphysics' and 'supernatural' are essentially synonymous terms, the first Greek, the second Latin. But 'supernatural' is the ultimate boo-word in secular culture, the one thing which all sensible folk are admonished to abjure.
So think about this: what is defined as 'natural' by natural philosophy amounts to what can be detected or validated, in principle, by observation (including observation by instruments) and mathematically sound reasoning based on such observations. That is what 'scientific proof' amounts to. In some areas of science, this has generated enormous issues of what counts as 'valid scientific reasoning' - in, for instance, cosmology, with the contentious 'string theory' and multiverse conjecture, and in physics, with the inherently incomplete nature of the 'standard model' (which are aspects of the various crises of physics.)
But leaving that aside, naturalism also methodologically excludes the possibility that there might be alternative cognitive modes or ways-of-knowing about which the sensorily-grounded methods of empirical science can detect nothing. Furthermore, it might be impossible to determine the nature of those kinds of 'modes of knowing' from within the empiricist paradigm, which more or less places the burden of proof on any critics to demonstrate the validity of any such modes in empirical terms. That is what is known as 'stacking the deck'. I think Western culture will easily do that without realising.
:ok: You seem to have your hands full. I'll get back to you later when it gets a little quieter. G'day.
No. I don't agree. Science is an ideology, not a religion. Religion is... well, no, I don't want to open that door here.
Quoting Wayfarer
I don't know how it was used in the olden days, but that's not what "metaphysics" means now. At least that's not all it means.
You cherry picked that quote: I said ‘for this kind of thinking, science is a religion’. I don’t think that most people see it like that, but it’s a significant strain of thought in come circles.
Science is many ideologies , or. more precisely, a historical continuum of transforming ideologies, moving in parallel with transformations in all other areas of culture , including and interwoven with the continuum of transforming ideologies of religion.
Not an important point for me in this discussion, but it bothers me in general. I think it is disrespectful to both science and religion.
I was using "ideology" in a fairly negative way in my post. Ideology as an inflexible, dogmatic viewpoint.
Quoting TheMadFool
It is possible the reason physics and the life sciences do not seem to converge on each other is not that there is something intrinsically different about the nature of life , but that the cocos tula foundation of physics has lagged behind that of evolutionary biology. That was Piaget’s argument. He suggested that physics would eventually catch up with where biology has led, in the same way that biology has recently converged with cognitive science via enactive self -organizing systems models. He mentions that complexity theory and dynamical
systems approaches show how physics can be re-thought as a science of creative self -transformation rather than static equilibrium states, and in this way reveal it to be dealing with ‘intentionality’.
“...physics is far from complete, having so far been unable to integrate biology and a fortiori the behavioural sciences within itsel. Hence, at present, we reason in dififerent and artificially simplified domains, physics being up to now only the science of non-living, non-conscious things. When physics becomes more 'general’, to use C.-E. Guye's striking expression-and discovers what goes on in the matter of a living body or even in one using reason, the epistemological enrichment of the object by the subject which we assume here as a hypothesis, will appear perhaps as a simple relativistic law ot perspective or of co- ordination of referentials, showing that for the subject the object could not be other than it appears to him, but also that from the object's point of view the subject could not be different.”
“ between two structures of different levels there can be no one-way reduction, but rather there is reciprocal assimilation such that the higher can be derived from the lower by means of transformations, while the higher enriches the lower by integrating it. In this way clectro-magnetism has enriched classical mechanics, giving rise to a new mechanics; and gravitation has been reduced to a kind of geometry in which curvature is determined by mass. Similarly we may hope that the reduction of vital processes to physico-chemistry will add new enriching properties to the latter.”
Prigogine's recent work on "dissipative-structures seems to show that the series "organism behavior- sensorimotor -conceptual psvchogenesis could be completed toward the lower end by relating the biological and hence cognitive structures to certain-forms ot dynamic equilibrium in physics (where the study of these structures -was motivated precisely by the need to relate the two disciplines to each other).
Of course, It doesn’t have to be used this way. Ideology can be synonymous with worldview, paradigm or philosophy, which is how I am using it to apply to science.
Quoting Wayfarer
No I would say if it exists, we can investigate it. 'Might be' is not 'is'. Otherwise it is woo.
But this and the rest of what he says is just rhetoric without examples.
Quoting Wayfarer
I don't think the case is made at all. All it is trying to do is say that isms are a dirty word and there's an attempt to turn the dreaded R word back on science.
Quoting Wayfarer
This quote and so many similar from people interested in spirituality just suggests (and you may not be like this) the underlying ethos of elitism and status seeking. I'm special because I have my God/Buddha/Guru/faith/Kabbalah... And of course by way of exquisite contrast the person who just wants evidence before accepting any claims is a lesser course human being. Not that you may be of this ilk.
Quoting Wayfarer
Sophistry. If miracles happen then there would be evidence.
Everything is ideology if you try hard enough.
Quoting Tom Storm
Are you familiar with the replication crisis? How do you reckon that would play out in respect of this question?
It plays out just fine. I don't accept claims unless there is evidence. If claims can't be reproduced they need to be shelved. Bad science exists, especially when tied to commercial stakeholders, esp drug companies. Or Young Earth Creationists. But the beauty of the method is that scientists are continually trying to falsify other scientist's results and their own. This makes it harder to justify nonsense because it will generally be exposed.
Young earth creationists have no evidence, obviously. Here’s a hypothetical: Dawkins always proclaims he would change his mind in the event of evidence. Now, one of the [s]heresies[/s] inadmissible theories of evolution is called ‘orthogenesis’. This is the idea that evolution develops towards particular ends - such as for example higher intelligence or self-awareness. As we all know, h. Sapiens exhibits these attributes, and also appears at the very last stages of the billions of years of evolutionary development. So if you were to try and provide evidence for orthogenisis, what would it take to convince Richard Dawkins that it’s real?
one of the inadmissible theories of evolution is called ‘appendecto-genesis’. This is the idea that evolution develops towards particular ends - such as for example gaining then loosing the function of the appendix. As we all know, h. Sapiens exhibits these attributes, and also appears at the very last stages of the billions of years of evolutionary development. So if you were to try and provide evidence for appendecto-genesis, what would it take to convince you that it’s real?
The point is there's a lot of stuff being called scientific that isn't.
Quoting Wayfarer
You need to put that to Dawkins. It's not my subject. But generally science is open to revision and new information. If It Is Proven. The time to believe something is when there is evidence.
I wouldn’t bother, unless I was a bench scientist. It’s not philosophically interesting.
Quoting Tom Storm
What would evidence of orthogenesis comprise? I mean, the difference between orthogenesis and mainstream theory is a process which unfolds towards an overall purpose, and a process which just happens to develop. You would agree that it’s a significant difference, would you not? I mean, in a criminal trial, ‘intent’ is often, or always, central. Here, we’re talking about the development of life generally. It’s one of the dogmas of evolutionary materialism that life is not guided, that it happens by chance, that it develops by fortuitous changes. ‘Rewind the tape of life’, said Gould, ‘and it might replay completely differently.’ Might it? What evidence is there for that?
I don't know,I am not a biologist. But here's the thing. If we discover that something is true we accept it.
Very much appreciate your courtesy and interest.
So what you personally find interesting is the measure of what should be globally acknowledged as acceptable theory?
Sounds very egotistical
It would be from the viewpoint of the ego. But, you know, ‘He who saves his own life will lose it’. Or alternatively,
Diamond Sutra
You too, Sir. I appreciate your patience and knowledge.
I would still ask you, as per my above question, if you are biased to accept only optimistic resolutions of your theist concerns, why shouldn't people suspect you that you prioritize your interest in solving your existential anxiety over the stoic pursuit for truth. I am talking about priorities here, not about your potential for actual attainment of stoicism. Do you admit any potential hypothesis that doesn't grant you dignity and peace of mind?
Quoting Wayfarer
There is difference between unfounded suspicion and reasonable suspicion. Suspicion is reasonable when you have already observed the deceptiveness of confidence from our mental faculties or when we have no prior experience with the analysis of phenomena of some kind. Do you mean to propose that human beings are not biased towards self-affirmation and that vanity does not distort their perception? You haven't encountered it in your routine interactions with people? Why not be consequently at least somewhat skeptical about the optimism in your own convictions?
Quoting Wayfarer
I said, might be, but I am not sure. What I don't understand is how such hypothesis, as the idea that the universe is self-contained, can be so decisively and completely negated in favor of another similarly unproven hypothesis. I may have my inclinations, but as you can see, I practice what I preach. I am skeptical. Theism may be right and there might be benevolent deity, but in consideration of all the possible theist possibilities, being so specific about aspects of the universe of which we have no prior perception whatsoever is not just biased, it is extravagant. Hypotheses have to be made with minimalism at mind. I would always ask question for each assumed property of theism.
Why antropocentrism and not ecocentrism? Why benevolent and not immoral deity? Why singularly directed omnipotent will and not many conflicting potencies? Why reasonable and not unreasonable foundation?
I see that this thread has moved on apace since last I joined the party. Really informative and enjoyable posts :) For someone who has just stepped into the Philosophy of Science for the first time I appreciate
the clarity and ease of communication.
I will venture a response:
First - not really comfortable with the word 'truth'. How do you understand it ? Is it about getting things right or the reaching of a specific goal, a solution to a problem or knowledge of how the world is ?
From what I understand so far, the realist position is that evidence or measurable data is key.
So, we are talking about objective, quantitative elements. That is one way of knowing.
In this respect, I agree that scientific practices are powerful in informing us about e.g. viruses and vaccines. Certain truths about the natural world. Reliable in that it can be shown to work - a current and wonderful way to diagnose and help heal. But is it uniformly reliable across the board ?
Next - Can I name an alternative that can provide us with reliable knowledge about the world ?
Not immediately but that doesn't mean that there isn't one.
Is measurement the only way that scientists reach solutions to problems ?
If I look at the question from a different perspective.
From the goal of 'truth' to that of reaching a specific goal - a solution to a problem.
There are 7 examples of scientific discoveries made in dreams.
https://www.famousscientists.org/7-great-examples-of-scientific-discoveries-made-in-dreams/
The one I remember from previous studies is that of August Kekulé and the problem of how the atoms in benzene are arranged.
Quoting The Doc
So, a different pathway - things that inspire geniuses from the subconscious.
Quantitative data collection and measurement is fine as a bedrock of scientific progress.
Qualitative, subjective elements also enter the picture.
The question arises as to whether a naturalist or materialist can account for subjective experience, that is consciousness. Clearly, we don't have a satisfactory explanation...yet.
Where the solution might come from...is probably science...but not necessarily so.
Don't you think Socrates or the Buddha would not be aware of this? Don't you think philosophers consider this? In our age, science is held up as this kind of impartial arbiter of everything real, but whose measure is that, really? Whose units make the measurement, who decides what is worthy of study?
Quoting simeonz
The convictions I truly trust are not merely originating from myself, I hope. Being self-critical is part of the path. That is why the true philosopher 'abandons herself'. It's actually the same as in science. When a scientist reports some result to get a grant or publish something, then they're no longer disinterested. They might still do something important, but the motivation is incorrect.
Quoting simeonz
The benevolent deity of Christianity is not a reassuring hotel manager who ensures that all the guests are comfortable. His benevolence might destroy everything you hold dear - only to finally show you something which is more important than what you hold dear. But there is no gaurantee. You can lose everything, that is the point. Otherwise, what are you risking? (This is something I learned from the Hindu teaching of Siva.) My reading of the God of Christianity is that God is often terrible, he's often not 'a nice guy' or a reassuring presence, and those who seek to know him are put through ordeals. Whereas, the devil is a nice guy. He makes you feel as though everything is OK. That says something about the culture we live in.
By the way, I like your posts.
Quoting Amity
I like the Sansrkit expression, being-knowing-bliss, sat-chit-ananda. In this compound, 'sat' is 'what is' meaning 'truth' not in the sense of 'a true proposition' but vision of the totality. This of course is generally alien to analytic philosophy, it's much more theosophical.
A sign of the times. Postmodernism has 'taught' us that we live in a relativist world and for at least 40 years many people have been afraid to call anything truth or a fact for fear of offending or being wrong. And there's the whole post-truth, alternative facts, science denying caper. As the man said to his doctor when told to quit smoking for health reasons, "That's just your opinion, Man."
Truth to me is small t not big T. As I wrote before - we were able to send men to the moon and back and yet some wonder if reality really exists or if it is really possible to make secure predictions using inductive reasoning.
When it comes to making choices in life we can determine what ideas are helpful or even probable based upon evidence. It's a fact that if you swallow certain poisons you die. It's a fact that people with type 1 diabetes require insulin. If you are going to cross a busy road, do you use faith and close your eyes as you step into the traffic or do you use careful observation with experience and then cross?
And sure, we can all make mistakes or get things wrong and there is no such thing as 100% certainty. And not everything may be knowable and just because it isn't knowable right now doesn't mean we are at liberty to insert a fallacy from incredulity and determine that the only explanation we can think of is the spirit world or magic.
Quoting Amity
There are a plethora of stories about dreams and coincidence and happy magical accidents impacting on the arts or discoveries or life altering events. Jung was fond of synchronicity. I generally say, so what? Can we actually test if such whimsical stories are true? And even if they are, do they really offer us a method for determining what actions to take and what to believe? I say no. The problem with thinking you are inspired by visions is, firstly this can't be tested, and secondly this could make you either Gandhi or Charles Manson.
Quoting Tom Storm
OK. Thanks to both for your different perspectives. I think I will leave it there for now.
And secular culture has no way of differentiating the two!
Well I just did, so that can't be right. Even the secular world has access to the homily: 'Ye shall know them by their fruits.'
Quoting Wayfarer
So are you saying that Chalmers is arguing the following?:
“One way of formulating the hard problem is to ask: if we had a complete, canonical, objective, physicalist account of the natural world, including all the physical facts of the brain and the organism, would it conceptually or logically entail the subjective facts of consciousness? If this account would not entail these facts, then consciousness must be an additional, non-natural property of the world.”
Or that he is agreeing with this?:
“One problem with this whole way of setting up the issue, however, is that it presupposes we can make sense of the very notion of a single, canonical, physicalist description of the world, which is highly doubtful, and that in arriving (or at any rate approaching) such a description, we are attaining a viewpoint that does not in any way presuppose our own cognition and lived experience. In other words, the hard problem seems to depend for its very formulation on the philosophical position known as transcendental or metaphysical realism.”
My impression was that Chalmers is sympathetic to the first position,not the second , that he is arguing from a realist perspective that consciousness is an additional property in the world.
Fair point.
I don’t see consciousness as ‘an additional property in the world’, and I don’t think that’s how Chalmers depicts it. Chalmers' issue is the how to provide an explanation of 'what it is like to be' something. 'In this central sense of "consciousness",' he says, 'an organism is conscious if there is something it is like to be that organism, and a mental state is conscious if there is something it is like to be in that state. Sometimes terms such as "phenomenal consciousness" and "qualia" are also used here, but I find it more natural to speak of "conscious experience" or simply "experience".'
This has been also been validated scientifically. If you look at this paper, you will see that this cognitive scientist acknowledges the cogency of the 'hard problem' which appears as the 'neural binding problem' in neuroscience:
Zahavi argues that Chalmers sees intentionality and phenomenology as separable properties in the world. It seems to me the paper you linked to also does this.
“Chalmers's discussion of the hard problem has identified and labeled an aspect of consciousness that cannot be ignored. However, his way of defining and distinguishing the hard problem from the easy problems seems in many ways indebted to the very reductionism that he is out to oppose. If one thinks that cognition and intentionality is basically a matter of information processing and causal co-variation that could in principle just as well go on in a mindless computer–or to use Chalmers' own favored example, in an experienceless zombie–then one is left with the impression that all that is really distinctive about consciousness is its qualitative or phenomenal aspect. But this seems to suggest that with the exception of some evanescent qualia everything about consciousness including intentionality can be explained in reductive (computational or neural) terms; and in this case, epiphenomenalism threatens.
To put it differently, Chalmers's distinction between the hard and the easy problems of consciousness shares a common feature with many other recent analytical attempts to defend consciousness against the onslaught of reductionism: They all grant far too much to the other side. Reductionism has typically proceeded with a classical divide and rule strategy. There are basically two sides to consciousness: Intentionality and phenomenality. We don't currently know how to reduce the latter aspect, so let us separate the two sides, and concentrate on the first. If we then succeed in explaining intentionality reductively, the aspect of phenomenality cannot be all that significant. Many non-reductive materialists have uncritically adopted the very same strategy. They have marginalized subjectivity by identifying it with epiphenomenal qualia and have then claimed that it is this aspect which eludes reductionism. But is this partition really acceptable, are we really dealing with two separate problems, or is experience and intentionality on the contrary intimately connected“
https://www.academia.edu/9561065/Intentionality_and_phenomenality_A_phenomenological_take_on_the_hard_problem
This resolves the neural binding problem:
In exactly what way consciousness emerged via evolution is a mystery, but we can be fairly certain about what had to obtain in order for it to be possible. Initially, electrical properties in aggregates of tissue such as the brain needed to be robust enough that a stable supervenience of electromagnetic field (EMF) was created by systematic electron fluxing. Quantum effects in molecules of the body are sensitive to trace EMF energy sources, creating a structural complex of relatively thermodynamic mass containing pockets of relatively quantum biochemistry integrated by sustained radiation.
EMF/quantum hybridization is likely responsible for our synthetic experience of qualia, how we perceive unfathomably minute and diverse fluctuating in environments as a perpetualized substrate, perturbed by its surroundings but never vanishing while we are awake and lucid, the essence of perceptual “stream of consciousness”.
Nonlocal phenomena are ever underlying the macroscopic substance of qualitative consciousness, its EMF properties as well as bulked matter in which nonlocality is partially dampened, and quantum processes in cells interface perception instantiated in bodies with nonlocality of the natural world which is still enigmatic to scientific knowledge.
Quantum features of biochemistry have likely been refined evolutionarily so that mechanisms by which relative nonlocality affects organisms, mechanisms of EMF/matter interfacing, mechanisms targeting particular environmental stimuli via functionally tailored pigments along with further classes of molecules and cellular tissues, and mechanisms for translation of stimulus into representational memory all became increasingly coordinated until an arrangement involving what we call ‘intentionality’ emerged, a mind with executive functions of deliberative interpretation and strategizing, beyond mere reflex-centric memory conjoined to stimulus/response.
Qualitative consciousness precedes the degree of unification we experience as humanlike awareness, for qualia can exist and perform a functional role in consort with quantum effects and additional gradations of nonlocal reality while an organism is almost entirely lacking the centralized control we would classify as intention.
Perhaps include electric charge distribution as an EMF mechanism and you've got a viable model, with intentionality being an emergent property of neuromaterial structure infused by qualia, which as I said earlier are additive superpositions amongst entangled waves and wavicles, not an epiphenomenon but a facet of matter's causation in similarity to shape and size.
You can't reject this idea while giving consideration to the hard problem of consciousness unless you're totally screwing around lol
and all other contributors
I have watched with interest and awe at the passionate exchanges which you have conducted on theoretical and principled grounds, but I feel that you have largely strayed from the original topic.
There have been comments about commentators, and the appropriate use of different philosophies and methodologies. You have strayed into trying to distinguish life from no life, and huge diversions into the nature of consciousness, along with some attempts to smear the debate by trying to say that there are hidden agendas to justify God and creationism if we dare to stray beyond the boundaries of materialism.
On that last point I feel obliged to point out that there are several other potentially valid philosophical options across the range of thinking. You may have a preference from within the range, (materialism included), but if the evidence does not disprove a workable option, it should not be dismissed out of hand.
I should also correct one point that seems to recur – Dualism does not advocate God or spirit, it only says that there is a second type of stuff underpinning our existence (beyond matter/energy). What characteristics that other stuff may have is open to secondary debate, but inevitably those characteristics must seek to plug apparent gaps in the principles that restrict Matter/Energy as we know it.
Your debates were intriguing to watch but they were also the reason why I stayed out of the fray until now. To me it all seemed to miss the purpose of the debate. However I sense that we are beginning to return to some practical issues and real evidence. So here are some further contributions from me.
Enrique, (if I understood him correctly), initially offered the suggestion that some of the early developments in the mechanisms of life might have emerged as a result of superpositions within the sterile chemical environment that could ‘consider’ a myriad of permutations simultaneously, allowing some more advanced molecules to emerge in rapid timeframes.
Even if that was correct, it is the distinguishing factors between 'one outcome that was ignored' and 'another that was progressed', that intrigues me, but which has not been explored by any of you – ie. what is the basis of such non-conscious factors…. before any life existed.
Your references in the previous post to the operations of the brain and quantum fluxing etc. are again beyond the point of this topic because the brain is based on a myriad of living cells, when the emergence of life did not have the luxury of any previously existing cell - just sterile chemicals.
Again - even if the original superposition mechanism did apply, it would still need to provide several examples of the same molecules for nature to experiment with them, and see if different proteins or RNA could work together.
Of course we know that some of them would ultimately produce such pairings, but even the simplest processes of life would require many such pairings to form a chain of chemical activity - all working together to achieve something bigger, whether intentionally or not.
The significance of this is that something has to bring the whole lot together because it is only as a whole, that life has viability - and therefore some mechanism/process needs to bring all the separate elements together in one place. But what could drive that circumstance other than chance?
We need to have suggestions if the materialist notion is to become viable. On such a glaring matter – assumptions that one will appear in favour of materialism, are far from guaranteed.
I asked for some brain-storming about what such influences might be in the absence of a ‘survival instinct’, but I can only see one vague referral to a possibility that it might somehow relate to chemical and energy equilibrium and stability. But is that enough?
The concept behind the basic evolutionary mechanism we know of, means that we do need to show how one random mutation could be preferred over another. Could energy stability really do this?
As you will all know from my previous postings, I base a lot of my comments on proven evidence, but I also feel that it is valid to interpret such evidence. As I have said in other posts, (which reflects my basic training and understanding)...
... the role of philosophy is to put a framework around the unknown: thereby establishing the range of possible explanations, and the criteria that can prove or disprove any set of beliefs. In contrast, the role of science is simply to provide relevant facts to narrow the range of options.
When scientists apply an interpretation to their findings, they are applying a philosophical judgement, and until their case is proven, there will always be alternate explanations from across the range of possibility. Yet 'Facts' remain unchanged, for ever, and therefore every philosophical interpretation must accommodate every relevant fact if it is to be held as potentially valid.
So can we please try to find solutions based on what the evidence and research tell us, and apply that principle in a consistent manner?
I think Tom Storm said that there was no possibility of applying logic without a brain because there was no example of a mind without a physical brain. Therefore logic and awareness could not apply at the level of the sterile chemical environment, pre-life.
Yet if we leave aside the nuance that a Mind is a very complex thing, and boil his basic principle down to more simple factors that might be present in reality without a brain, then I'm afraid there are many proven examples that go against his suggestion.
As a start, there are a number of single celled creatures which do show crude awareness and possibly even a small degree of intelligence without a brain. The single celled amoeba – Didinium swims around and preys on other cells – paralysing them with darts that it fires before it eats them… implying intent, targeting, and recognition.
As mentioned in other posts, it is also clearly demonstrated that some of the activities of enzyme molecules undertaking DNA repair, do seem to display the characteristics of awareness without any known chemical or computational mechanism, even in theory, to explain it.
That doesn’t mean that a materialist solution won’t be found, but as things stand after decades of research, the evidence shows that these molecules do seem to break known principles that we apply to Matter/Energy.
The evidence that counters materialism should be recognised as much as the examples which might support it.
More significantly, when it is undeniable that DNA represents a template, and the cellular mechanism for reproduction involves 3 sets of coded interactions and translations – what chemical factor could possibly result in a need to preserve and maintain a template, while linking it to complex multi-layer codes being applied as a standard. Nobody seems to have commented on this.
That is not a factor to be ignored, and again the potential implications should be recognised and not swept under the carpet by materialists hoping for a solution that may not come. We should be debating potential solutions openly and then seeking evidence to test out the different options.
Philosophy allows us to explore potential avenues of exploration by structured speculation which can be tested.
So can we please speculate about solutions that have practical application in the circumstances of the examples, rather than endless debates about methods?
Thanks.
I went back and reread the original post and quickly scanned the other posts in the thread, mine and other peoples. I think the thread is surprisingly on target with the OP given 142 posts. You abandoned the thread, not participating after the first couple. That is generally considered inconsiderate behavior. Not collegial, which is the goal, if not usually the result, here. It takes a lot of nerve for you to come back now and complain. You've lost any authority over the thread due to an original poster.
Quoting Gary Enfield
You had your chance. Go fry ice.
Kids have ~ 75% water in their body when they are born.
So i strongly believe water had a crucial role in forming the "living cell".
Water has some strange properties, that not even today are fully understood.
One key thing is that water has memory, meaning it can keep a lot of information in it.
Ex.: Think of it as water is an 100000 TerraBytes hard drive that can store a lot of data and information, even more(the above terrabytes was just a sample as i don't know exactly how much data you can store in it, it could be trillions of terrabytes ??? ).
Because of this water property of "storing information", if you throw a small rock(a pebble) into a lake or a river .That water surface can remember almost forever that a "specific small stone" had fall in it.
It can also sense vibrations or sounds and store it as an information, so an erupting volcano, earthquakes or meteor crashes can be stored in water.
Sound, music and vibrations had also a vital role in forming the "living cell".
Dont think of it as only water with mixed chemical elements, vibrations and sounds are important.
Of course if the water has evaporated that information is mostly gone.
Now If you add all the millions years since the Earth has formed and all the meteors, asteroids that hit it.
All that information was stored in our rivers, lake and oceans.
So to summary this the "Living Cell" is made by water with a lot of mixed information in it from : chemical elements, vibrations and sounds from asteroid collisions.
One type of "cell" was used for evolution of vegetation(trees,grass, plants) and the second type "living cell" for evolution of fish.Then from fish surfaced from water in time: the reptiles, the dinosaurs and finally the animals.
This is only my theory, it will be hard to back it all by science.
I really like to see your opinions on this, or maybe to see other theories that i did not think of and could have a little logic as well.
I suggest you go back and read some of the posts in this thread, especially those at the beginning. Your theory is not consistent with the current scientific understanding of life, or water for that matter.
But materialism is a form of monism. To admit that there’s something real other than matter-energy us to reject materialism and open the door to all manner of speculations. That is the point of the Richard Lewontin quote I mentioned to @Tom Storm:
[quote=Richard Lewontin]Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.[/quote]
And this single-mindedness is because scientific materialism is a direct descendant of the belief in the 'jealous God'. Just as the 'jealous God' allowed no worship of anyone but Him, so the scientific philosophy that Christendom gave rise to, insists that there is but a single Substance, and to admit of any form of dualism is to lapse into idolatory or heresy. The 'jealous God' dies hard!
Quoting Gary Enfield
Those scare quotes immediately put us in the territory of metaphysics, like or not. I said @Enrique's suggestion seemed like pseudo-science to me, perhaps it's not, but to be convinced I would have to se reference to something published, other than a Forum contributor's opinion as I'm in no position to judge it.
Quoting Gary Enfield
You're describing empiricism, or perhaps natural philosophy, but not philosophy as such.
Quoting Gary Enfield
None of us here are specialists in biochemistry or organic chemistry, and besides, it's a philosophy forum, not a science or chemistry forum. Nobody here is going to solve this problem, but we can discuss the philosophical implications, which is what we're doing.
Quoting Gary Enfield
I provided a reference to, and quotes from, Marcello Barbieri, biochemist, on what is information? He explicitly addresses these questions. He also notes that Hubert Yockey, a pioneering author in the field of information science applied to biology, claimed
Quoting Gary Enfield
You can't be too positivist about that.
From John Wheeler, Law without Law
There's an awful lot of work put in by theists and other spear carriers for the supernatural to try to show that atheism is just bad religion. But this is no argument, it is just simple name calling. It's understandable, there's a lot of anger towards science because it has destroyed the fantasy life of many people.
The problem is no one has yet provided any evidence that there is a God or any kind of supernatural realm. And no one has found a pathway to any reliable knowledge other than though methodological realism. I would never say that science is 100% certain or that humans can have access to capital T truth. But we know what works and what is merely speculation or fantasy.
Smug and self-satisfied, but wrong, or at least not right. I think there is a strong metaphysical, but not supernatural, argument for God, or at least god. I've made it before in this forum. I know it's right, because neither theists nor atheists like it. This is not the place to go into it.
When I said no consciousness without a brain I was not referring to simple celled creatures which may or may not have awareness or brains. Given I believe in evolution, there would no doubt have been a point when nascent 'not quite' consciousness went with nascent 'not quite' brains. Not really a useful distinction in my mind. Maybe I should have said where is consciousness without a material host?
T Clark - have some respect and do not resort to name calling. If you think what I said about science destroying the fantasy life of many people isn't true or 'smug' then listen to the stories of people who attend Recovering from Religion a large world-wide peer support group who document precisely this phenomenon. That's where I heard this expression. Surviving religion is a very hard struggle for many people and to call this insight self-satisfied is quite wrong.
I didn't say anything about you. Didn't name call. I only commented on your response, which was disrespectful to Wayfarer and anyone with religious beliefs. I responded snippily.
We are having a debate about complex and personal things. Look out someone might get hurt! That's how it works and I was only responding to something Wayfarer said about views like mine which was an equally robust jibe. Wayfarer and I get on just fine - I like him a great deal and we are simply talking shop.
You may notice that people who do not accept supernatural beliefs and assert methodological naturalism as the only reliable tool for knowledge tend to fall victim to a lot of pretty demeaning feedback about being narrow minded, unimaginative, blind, short sighted, judgmental, fundamentalist and dogmatic.
And an even more important point, is that the materialist view is not more 'proven' than any other worldview. It can't be proven, because it is not a specific, testable claim about a specific thing, or class of things, but a claim about the nature of the world. As such, it's a philosophical attitude, not an empirical argument. And besides, if the conundrums of quantum physics have not shot down materialism yet, then it shows that no scientific discovery is likely to.
The view that the theistic outlook 'lacks evidence' doesn't see what 'evidence' would be required to support such a view. For the religious, the order of nature *is* evidence. And science itself has no explanation for that order. It discovers the order of nature, and learns to make predictions on that basis, the very power which has yielded all the many devices, discoveries and inventions that we use day to day. But it doesn't explain that order. There's 'the order of nature' as we all acknowledge. But the question of 'the nature of the order' is an entirely different matter and not necessarily a scientific matter.
Neither does theistic belief necessarily explain the order of nature, but it *is not* a scientific hypothesis. In Christian terms, it is a command 'to love one another as I have loved you', etc. So the idea that this can be at odds with 'science' is actually something like a category mistake.
But how all of this relates back to the OP, is the insistence, not on the part of science, but on the part of scientific ideologues, like the 'new atheists', that science proves or shows that life is the result of chance occurence, that humans are 'really no different' to animals, and other such philosophical judgements which are not scientifically grounded at all. I maintain, and this is where I tend towards the religious end of the spectrum, that because all living beings exhibit in some sense intentionality, that this introduces a basic distinction, an ontological distinction, between the living and non-living realms. And where you have an ontological distinction, you have (at least) a duality, which undermines the argument that there is a single substance, namely, matter-energy. It is that insistence on my part, not adherence to a religious creed, that marks me out as an opponent of the view that I'm criticizing. And it's certainly not 'name-calling'. :rage:
Lewontin is just one of many people who have proposed this kind of response and I think I responded to it fine.
Quoting Wayfarer
This is a disingenuous line of reasoning. I have repeatedly said we don't have capital T truth. We don't have access to ultimate reality. We don't even know if there is an ultimate reality. There's no doubt that ideas about materialism may come to be more complex and interesting than we currently understand it to be. But if it can be identified and measured, it is still materialism.
Worldviews are not all alike they are not equally valid, which is what your comments might lead some people to think. We currently do have access to propositions and approaches and models which provide consistent and reliable results and knowledge in the only world we can claim to know. Outside of methodological materialism and the scientific method, no one else has been able to do this.
Look at the Templeton Foundation's study on the effect of prayer on patient outcomes in the mid naughties. This particular worldview (Christianity) failed to provide any results and in fact some people fared worse when prayed for. Naturally enough, the worldview of scientific medicine saves lives every day and this can approach can be demonstrated empirically and repeatedly.
There are lots of games we can play about what we really know. As people boringly point out, you can't disprove that you are a brain in a vat and everything is an illusion. The problem of hard solipsism cannot be readily overcome. But is anyone here going to walk into the path of traffic on the basis that everything is an illusion?
If someone can provide good evidence of just one robust example of a supernatural claim being true, let's hear it. I'd love to be wrong.
Who is 'we'?
Who are you?
Quoting Tom Storm
I could - but from long experience, I bet it would become a 'coconut shy'.
[quote=Wikipedia]A coconut shy is a traditional game frequently found as a sidestall at funfairs and fêtes. The game consists of throwing wooden balls at a row of coconuts balanced on posts. Typically a player buys three balls and wins when each coconut is successfully dislodged. In some cases other prizes may be won instead of the coconuts.[/quote]
Where 'the evidence' is a coconut :-)
I had left this thread but return now to respond to your reply to me and others listed:
Quoting Gary Enfield
Quoting Gary Enfield
Straying from an OP is not unusual in a thread. I mentioned that I didn't want to go off track and also referenced the OP in my posts. At no point did you engage until now.
The discussion has been a valuable one and yes 'intriguing' but that is no reason to 'stay out of the fray'.
It has always been my understanding that whoever starts a thread has the responsibility to manage it. You must be willing to engage those who engage.
Instead of leaving the thread unattended and simply observing, there are options open to you:
1. Reply to posts which you don't consider relevant and request a return to the specifics of the OP.
2. Flag and report any such posts to the moderators.
3. If there is a significant but valuable move to another topic, then another thread can be started.
However, sometimes this disrupts the flow of a fascinating conversation; as such it may be tolerated.
I agree with @T Clark when he said that the thread was 'surprisingly on target with the OP given 142 posts. You abandoned the thread, not participating after the first couple. That is generally considered inconsiderate behavior.'
I hope that my response is seen as useful and constructive advice.
As usual you're confusing 'agreeing with' with 'recognising'.
Quoting Wayfarer
Are you serious? You're in a philosophy forum and you're seriously just going to outright say that some judgement which you know full-well is highly contested, by intelligent academics, is 'undeniable'?
Quoting Wayfarer
As usual, you've deliberately misrepresented the claim of materialists. If you can find me a single quote from a single materialist claiming that their position is the 'way the world is' I'd be very surprised. It's certainly not a majority view. Materialism works better than other approaches. It's testable (so we can find common ground more easily) it give useful predictions (we all interact with matter) and it doesn't introduce more elements than are required (so, again maximising common ground).
Quoting Wayfarer
Thus misunderstanding what 'evidence' is. Evidence is that which convinces a person of a position they were not convinced of prior to seeing it (either by doubt or by being of an opposing conviction). If you have to already believe in a position in order to count matters as 'evidence', then the 'evidence' is not doing any work is it?
Quoting Wayfarer
It has dozens. again you're confusing 'explanations I don't like/agree with' and 'lack of explanation'.
Quoting Wayfarer
Come on! That's bullshit and you know it. Theistic belief (in Christian term) is not a command to "love one another as I have loved you". It's a very specific and detailed set of instructions. It includes specific dates you can and can't eat meat for fuck's sake. when you can and can't have sex. Who you can marry.... It's a bullshit argument to try and whitewash all that with a vague "it's all about loving your neighbour"... people loved their neighbours to no lesser or greater degree before Christianity than they did after.
Quoting Wayfarer
What you 'maintain' doesn't 'undermine' anything. The former is your personal belief, the latter is a public argument. You don't undermine a public argument by holding a belief that it isn't valid. The public argument doesn't give a shit about what you happen to reckon. That's why we use 'evidence' - because it's shared - it's something we all believe in.
If you claim there's three apples in the bowl, me 'maintaining' that there's two doesn't have any bearing on your argument at all, but If I upend the bowl and count them "one, two", it does. Why? Because you do not necessarily share that which I 'maintain', but you do share my object recognition and my methods of counting.
We all share materialism. You believe in physics, the billiard-ball predictability of macro-scale matter. So do I. So anything from that realm counts as 'evidence' between us. You might additionally believe in all sorts of woo, but that doesn't count as evidence between us in the same way because I don't.
You do realise that being able to easily knock them down is pretty much the definition of not robust? So your answer is "No, I couldn't"
The reason I said who are you is presumably you might have felt not part of 'we'. You were speaking for others, perhaps 'enlightened' parties.
I think I can stand by this claim. What evidence do you have that someone knows capital T truth? What evidence do you have there is a capital T truth. I am presumptuous, but for the Left.... Sorry, old Woody Allen joke.
Sure, evolution is like a secular religion. No question.
[quote=Michael Ruse] There is professional evolutionary biology: mathematical, experimental, not laden with value statements. But, you are not going to find the answer to the world's mysteries or to societal problems if you open the pages of Evolution or Animal Behaviour. Then, sometimes from the same person, you have evolution as secular religion, generally working from an explicitly materialist background and solving all of the world's major problems, from racism to education to conservation. Consider Edward O. Wilson, rightfully regarded as one of the most outstanding professional evolutionary biologists of our time, and the author of major works of straight science. In his On Human Nature, he calmly assures us that evolution is a myth that is now ready to take over Christianity. And, if this is so, “the final decisive edge enjoyed by scientific naturalism will come from its capacity to explain traditional religion, its chief competition, as a wholly material phenomenon. Theology is not likely to survive as an independent intellectual discipline” [/quote]
That is why when the likes of Thomas Nagel published his book on what was wrong with it, he was treated as a heretic. But then, I recognise that you think
Quoting Isaac
Quoting Isaac
Materialism is simply 'the theory or belief that nothing exists except matter and its movements and modifications.' Many people believe it, it is the de facto belief system in secular culture.
Quoting Isaac
But love is the important point. As it culturally manifests, it is thousands of things including rules and strictures and the like. There’s no single ‘Christian religion’, but agape - unconditional compassion - is the central point in my view. ‘If I have not love....’ etc.
I don’t buy efforts by Christian apologists to prove that God exists with reference to science. That is the kind of reverse error to materialism.
Quoting Isaac
Fair point. But when it comes to the question at hand, what would constitute evidence? People have an inclination to believe, or not to believe, according to which they’ll make their judgements. And the will not to believe is just as strong as the opposite. But usually, the kind of evidence that is called for, is empirical evidence which isn’t relevant in this case.
Quoting Tom Storm
How could I answer. There are texts in the corpus of world literature that I think speak legitimately of Capital T Truth. But you’re not going to find the kind of evidence you’re looking for.
Oh right. No you've said it twice it's definitely a fact. Let me try that "I have a hundred pounds in my pocket ", "I have a hundred pounds in my pocket". Damn,..it doesn't seem to be working...am I not saying it right?
Quoting Wayfarer
Find me a quote claiming that from a prominent materialist.
Quoting Wayfarer
What the hell has 'loving one's neighbour' got to do with not eating meat on a Friday? Or mutilating your own child's genitals?
Quoting Wayfarer
Nothing. If by "question at hand" you mean something like your "why is there order in nature" then what counts as evidence is not yet defined. The question 'why' does not contain within it the definition of what constitutes and answer. It's one of the main tactics of sophistry used by woo merchants like yourself. "Ah, but that doesn't explain why..." as if 'why' had a defined answer.
The point you're missing is that we're talking to each other. Your personal beliefs about things are of no consequence to me whatsoever. All we can talk about is that which we share. The very act of language necessitates that.
It's not that materialism is all that anyone thinks. It's that it all we share. The table, the cup, you me, that fact that keys I'm hitting will make the words appear on your screen. So that is all we can talk about when it comes to matters we don't already all believe in. What you think is evidence of nothing other than what you think. that you 'feel' there's something more to life than just chemicals is fine and dandy, but it's not evidence of anything other than that your feel some way. It has not bearing on how I do or should feel.
Contrarily, how a shared object interacts with another shared object does relate to how I do or should feel. We share those objects. What I believe about them you also believe about them, we work to keep our beliefs similar enough to get on. Life just falls apart if you go about believing gravity causes objects to rise and I believe it causes them to fall. We need to check and agree.
Empirical evidence is not just 'one type of evidence among others' It is the only type of evidence we are compelled to agree on (as a class, not the specific evidence at hand). Any other types have no normative force at all, because we do not share a world made of them.
I don't think you know what I'm getting at, but regrettably having to explain a philosophical position to someone in order to show what is wrong with it never works out.
Quoting Isaac
Science does not explain the order of nature. As one well-known scientist put it, 'I'm not an atheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written these books. It does not know-how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws.'
Einstein, his Life and Universe, Walter Isaacson, p 386.
Quoting Isaac
...given that only what the kind of evidence empiricism can consider is counted as evidence. Empiricism subjects everything to the tribunal of 'what can be sense and quantified'. What cannot be quantified is discounted a priori. But, as Einstein also said, 'not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted, counts.'
Appreciate this perspective, thanks. Yep, we may be stuck here in the badlands forever. As you would no doubt expect from me, I would say texts are not evidence, they are claims. Claims need to be examined and tested to determine if they are sound.
How can you tell which text has capital T truth and which text is false? Surely the whole problem inherent in this worldview is the notion that telling good from bad, true from false rests on no sound epistemological basis.
Etc, etc.
Any particular texts you consider to be profound in this way?
I try to be open minded and certainly do not define myself as a materialist, but the above is just incorrect. Nothing in biochemistry breaks the laws of physics, not even DNA repair enzymes. Those critters are not self-aware, they are just very sophisticated molecular machines.
As to how life could have appeared from inanimate matter, it must be through some intermediary stage between life as we know it and carbon-based chemistry as we know it. A stage were not yet cells but far simpler macromolecules (RNA, proteins) are the basic element of replication. A soup of self-replicating macromolecules, competing with one another (so to speak) through chemical reactions. The winners are the molecules that become more frequent than others in the soup.
It's an interesting question and I would like to respond to it, but I think it belongs to a different thread.
I might ask you, are you aware of the work of Marcello Barbieri, who is the originator of 'code biology'? I have referred to his paper What is Information?. I find it very interesting. He describes what is required in distinguishing organisms from minerals.
I'm sorry but are you trying to argue that life predates the the big bang?
In fact it feels like you're saying that the universe outdates the big bang??
I must explain that nothing outdates the big bang as it is the first event in any history, present or future.
Carbon based life forms, as you can tell from the name, evolve from carbon, which was only created after the big bang.
Here here!
That information is drawn from a great book called Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology by Johnjoe McFadden. It talks about much of the recent research into quantum phenomena in nature and is a good general introduction to quantum physics for the layman. That's the best reference I can come up with.
Excellent primer. I struggle to find anything I would disagree with in this text, though if I may, I also don't find it so original and new. It sounds more like standard biology to me... You cannot understand modern biology if you treat molecules in an organism as just physical objects. The concept of feedback loop for instance becomes meaningless.
One aspect which I see as fundamental to the whole shebang is folding. I have talked about it in the "Emergence" thread. An organic protein is not just a linear sequence of amino acids, it is that sequence correctly folded into a functional molecular machine. Most of times the folding happens spontaneously. The sequence will fold naturally a certain correct, functional way, at least if temperature is within a certain range. In other cases, a chaperon protein (a protein that 'cares' for other proteins) is needed to fold a linear sequence of amino acids into a functional protein.
In Barbieri's terms, folding is what gives a meaning to the information that a linear sequence of aminoacids provides. In my terminology, the 1 dimensional information of the latter is translated (or interpreted) into a 3D functional form via protein folding. But folding is a more general process: a growing embryo is folding sheets after sheets of cells into a functional 3D machine called a body. It's the same general idea: folding is what you need to move from the one dimensional genetic information to a 3 dimensional organism.
A bit like an origami if you will. My intuition is that it's an important piece of the puzzle.
The meaning of any biological information can be equated to "What's in it for me?" What is the potential significance of the info for the organism? It is therefore context-dependent, emerging, and inherently subjective, in my opinion. In the literal sense that without a biological subject (a living organism with some inclination for survival and reproduction), information has no meaning.
Ah yes, a Wayfarer classic. "You don't agree with me, therefore there must be something you're not understanding". Have you even considered the possibility that it might be you who doesn't understand? That I cannot know what you're getting at because it is incoherent?
Quoting Wayfarer
What would constitute an 'explanation', and why? That you personally don't find the explanation satisfactory does not mean science doesn't explain it.Quoting Wayfarer
Yes. As I just explained, this is not mindless dogma. There's a fundamental and very compelling reason why that's the case. It's because we're talking to one another, two humans. The thing we share is the material world. Anything else is not shared, so there's no fact of the matter about it to be discussed. You might feel there's a purpose to life. I might not. It's irrelevant to any discussion because there's no shared content. If you feel the cup is on the table and I don't, we can both reach for it and find out.
Hi Amity / T Clark
I had hardly abandoned the discussion when the original post had been just 5 days earlier!
I don’t mind people pursuing their interests, and couldn't stop them doing so anyway, but it is still permitted for me to say when things are off topic – when I believe they are – having set the OP.
In terms of my standing back – you have clearly been posing questions to each other rather than me. Looking back on the posts there have been some disagreements with what I said – responses which were made as statements rather than questions, and which were responded to by others.
Looking back - nobody has directly addressed any question to me - other than as a means of posing a question which they seemed to want to answer themselves. Almost all were concerned with method rather than ideas to resolve.
This is a discussion group - so let's discuss.
Do you have any comments on the evidential subject matter?
Hi Oliver 5
Quoting Olivier5
Nothing which the chemistry describes in chemical terms breaks the laws of physics and chemistry -but those descriptions don't explain how things do what they do - which was the purpose of the exercise.
Until those chemical mechanisms do explain what is observed, you cannot claim that your statements are correct.
Enzymes, proteins, RNA, DNA and the rest, are all just single molecules - all be it complex ones.
The energy analysis of the chemistry has only shown that these things are able to fold naturally in a shape that acts like a key, (for one other component that it will be able to react with). It does nothing to explain the behaviour that is witnessed by researchers over and over again.
The variable series of activities which these things deploy to achieve a predictable complex outcome, (eg. DNA repair) rather than an arbitrary outcome has yet to be explained, and until materialism can do this - it cannot claim to have proven its case by any means.
Hi Adughep
I agree that water does have special properties in relation to the development of life and as NASA will tell you, the search for water is the first step in the search for life as we know it.
The question is whether the contribution made by water is mechanical, or something more - akin to the essence of life which was a key feature of Vitalism.
Finipolscie provided a very good and comprehensive list of these positive contributions by water in his 2nd book, but none represented any sort of life force or even any ability to carry and transfer information.
Until further evidence arises to the contrary I am therefore inclined to believe that water's contribution is largely as a chemical/mechanical enabler.
What would an explanation consist of that's missing from the materialist account?
Let's say (for the sake of argument alone) that the materialist explanation was "it just happened to turn out that way".
What's wrong there? Are you saying it's somehow impossible for things to just turn out some way? Because if not, then all the while there continues to be a complete absence of any indication to the contrary, "it just happened to turn out that way" is the best explanation we have.
Hi Wayfarer
Quoting Wayfarer
I agree - monism is very different to Dualism. For the benefit of others, we can also say that there are also very different forms of monism from materialism to idealism and beyond.
The underlying question for each of these perspectives is - what do the different concepts of 'underlying stuff' represent, and is there anything in the evidence which conflicts with any of those notions - which would either render that concept inaccurate, or at least, not the complete story.
Dualism arose from the simple notion that if we can establish characteristics which break the mould of a single type of stuff, why not have both? We then have to ask what each type of stuff might bring to the party - it doesn't have to be God or even Thought - it could simply be randomness, or something even more down to earth. What Dualism can potentially offer determinists is a way to maintain their principle of strict cause and effect when no other such factor can be found in Matter/Energy.... but that other stuff certainly doesn't have to be God.
If Dualism isn't accepted, the other monist or even Pluralistic beliefs have to provide an explanation for the factors/evidence which challenged their understanding.
[quote="Richard Lewontin"]Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural....
Quoting Wayfarer
Again - it is a lot simpler if we confine science to the facts that it establishes. The interpretations of scientists are philosophy - even if they tend to prefer materialist views and not consider others.
Is it against common sense to talk of multiple parallel universes? It is not illogical, but it is 'unbalanced' and unfair if this type of speculation is allowed to stand, but not Dualism, which is a lot simpler.
Materialism is a belief or faith because it cannot prove its case in those areas where its principles are demonstrated, at face value, to be broken.
Again - if materialism is to gain the upper ground, it needs to acknowledge the evidence that challenges it and not just sweep it aside in the hope that something will deal with those examples later.
Quoting Wayfarer
I'm sorry but I disagree. The whole purpose of philosophy is to speculate about possible solutions, while framing them in some logical parameters. We are all capable of valid speculation when we know the criteria that we have to work within.
We are also reasonably familiar with what the capabilities of Matter/Energy are. So we can try to narrow in on the factors that Matter/Energy or anything else would have to overcome in order to produce (say) a mechanism based on codes.
Hi Isaac
The whole purpose of a materialist/chemical process is to show that the Laws of Physics and Chemistry apply when explaining a situation.
If many processes in life - and particularly within a cell - are shown not to be arbitrary or by chance, then an answer based on chance is not addressing the issue and is certainly not a solution. We have to be given a process that can inevitably lead to every outcome - because that is how the laws of Physics and Chemistry are formulated - using traditional mathematics with just one outcome for every scenario.
Even in concept, can you suggest any mechanism by which these molecules adapt their behaviour to different circumstances to produce the perfect, predictable, end outcome - such as a fully repaired section of DNA with a double break and pieces missing?
When anyone is able to suggest any credible way in which this, (and the other undeniable examples) could be achieved, (even before it is proven), then materialists can claim that their philopsohy is valid in these circumstances.
But they can't - and that is equally true of the steps necessary to form the first living cell. They are not even close - especially on matters of principle.
And there are many such examples across the full scope of scientific research, (although the field of biochemistry has a greater concentration than most), so materialism cannot say that its principles apply everywhere. There are too many examples which break materialist notions.
Hi Tom Storm
Quoting Tom Storm
As I understood it, you were trying to argue that no form of living response based on awareness and analysis could be undertaken without a brain - and by implication pre-life chemicals or any isolated cell... such as a single celled creature.
I referred to examples which were uncovered by scientific research, and which are not denied. There is an apparent response by things without a brain that seems to apply at least some level of adaptive logic without even the hint of a chemical mechanism to do so.
Either there is such a capability that can be deployed by a bunch of chemicals without a brain - or there isn't. If you say there isn't then what is your alternate mechanism?
If it is possible - then to what extent might it apply in more generalised situations?
Materialism needs to acknowledge the things that appear to contradict it.
How would you show that?
Quoting Gary Enfield
In theory, yes. But a model which gives us six out of every ten is better than one which gives only five. Materialism only need show it's a better model than alternatives.
Quoting Gary Enfield
Yes, the biochemistry of the components seems capable.
Quoting Gary Enfield
Here's your issue. Like Wayfarer, you're confusing what you personally find satisfying with something that should count as evidence for others. Why would I revise any of my beliefs based on what you find credible. It's only what I find credible that matters.
Quoting Gary Enfield
There are none. You've simply not understood mainstream materialist claims.
You're new to the forum, so you don't know this - I am much more civil in my discussions than I was when I started. I give the forum a lot of the credit for that. I've worked hard to keep my irritation to myself. Clearly, I'm not always successful. In that light, I have a question.
I do think your response to Wayfarer was smug. You ridiculed theists' beliefs to make a rhetorical, but not rational, point. Let's not argue about whether or not my characterization is true for now. How should I have responded to you? This is way off post, so I'll listen to what you have to say but won't respond. I don't want to send the thread off into space.
Five days is more than the lifetime of the average thread. As I said, I went back and looked at the OP and various responses. In general, they were responsive and directly addressed the issues you raised.
Quoting Gary Enfield
I made responsive comments on your OP five days ago. Why would I want to repeat them now?
It's fine if you want to participate now. I respect an original poster's authority to intervene to keep the discussion on-post. I've done it myself, but you've lost standing to kvetch.
Wiki says :
“Materialism is a form of philosophical monism that holds that matter is the fundamental substance in nature, and that all things, including mental states and consciousness, are results of material interactions. According to philosophical materialism, mind and consciousness are by-products or epiphenomena of material processes (such as the biochemistry of the human brain and nervous system), without which they cannot exist.”
Is this consonant with your view of materialism?
If so, I can give you plenty of examples of psychologists who considers themselves to be doing science but yet reject materialism. They deal with entities that can be identified and measured, but these are not ‘matter’ in a physicalistic sense but intersubjectively constructed patterns. And they do not believe these are reducible to physicalistic matter.
Quoting Isaac
We don’t ‘share’ the material world because the notion of a same world for everyone is incoherent. We each interpret a world relative to our unique vantage. This can result in communities of normative agreement because of relative interpersonal similarities in outlook. Quantitative methods in empirical research only work by masking interpersonal differences in interpretation, to provide the illusion that everyone is on the same page.
The reason there can appear to be more agreement within a scientific community than within a philosophical community is because the former uses less precise, more abstractive concepts than the latter.
As John Shotter wrote:
“ So, although two scientists might not differ at all in doing calculations, making predictions, and in pro-explanations when working with scientific formulae, differences could still occur between them in the connections and relations they sense as existing within the phenomena of their inquiries. But these would only show up, notes Hanson (1958) in the different directions their new inquiries would take, “in ‘frontier' thinking – where the direction of new inquiry has regularly to be redetermined” (p.118).”
Okay so you are retracting your earlier wild claim that "these molecules do seem to break known principles that we apply to Matter/Energy." Macromolecules do not break any principles that I know of.
Quoting Gary Enfield
Materialism (at least in it's eliminative, reductionist form) is self-contradictory, and therefore logically false.
I agree that reductionists in particular fail to account for the "information revolution" that biology has seen for the past 70 years. To reduce biology to billard balls rolling on a carpet is to not take what we've learnt seriously. Rest assured that most biologists agree.
It doesn't mean the gods designed us. Maybe they did, maybe not. If any god designed us, the guy was a slow learner. It took Him ages...
To me it just means philosophers need to take modern science into more serious consideration, and admit to the importance of information management as a key dimension of life.
Sure! But the remark you made:
Quoting Isaac
I think that conveys an incorrect grasp of the point at issue. Really, I'm not just bollocking you or engaging in ad homs, but that's not the point at issue. And trying to explain the point at issue while being met with a constant spray of angry invective is not possible. So I understand that you can't stand a word I say, and I"m alright with that. It's a discussion forum, there are always going to be irreconcilable points of view being expressed.
Quoting Gary Enfield
Actually It arose from the observation of the duality of matter and form.
Quoting Gary Enfield
I think the advent of the 'information paradigm' as @Olivier5 says, does that to a large extent. That is why biosemiotics is an important discipline. But notice that the source I quoted believes that the literal origin point of life can never be known in principle, that it's 'formally undecideable'. And also defends the point of view that the emergence of life really is the emergence of a completely novel kind of order in the Universe that can't be fully explained in terms of physics and chemistry alone.
Thanks! I actually stumbled on this guy a couple of weeks ago and thought he looked pretty interesting, I will revisit him.
Reflection is a good thing. I think there's an easy distinction to make - you comment on the ideas not the person's character. In this case you could have said, "To me this response sounds a little smug and satisfied.... and explained why. Reasons are important, as you know. This could then be explored.
And when I say, 'look out someone might get hurt' I am referring to the fact that when people meet ideas that challenge them, it often lands as an ontological shock. It's hard to mitigate against that.
When they contradict, perhaps. But hey, I am methodological naturalist as I have said. Not a philosophical naturalist - that would also require evidence. Few people say that materialism is the whole story, Gary - what we say is it is the only reliable model we have access to.
What I hold is that all we have access to is the physical world and the only reliable knowledge we can acquire for now (and perhaps forever) is through this lens. If tomorrow we prove there are souls or ghosts with evidence, I'll be happy to accept it.
Not sure Barbieri goes there. You have a quote? To me, a determinist universe could not engender life, because nothing really new happens in a determinist universe. But QM points to an indeteminist universe, open to radical novelty. A universe where a lot more things can happen than just the same old billard balls rolling eternally on the same old carpet...
Maybe you mean when he says that life = matter + energy + information. This implies that biology has some exclusivity on information, which is incorrect. As Aristotle found, there's no matter without form, and thus without information.
Inanimate matter as we know it has structure, and novel structures emerge spontaneously from it all the time, snowflakes being the classic example.
And like snowflake are all unique in their shape, in their morphology, biological information is extremely diverse and expresses itself in physical forms or shapes, generally produced by some protein folding. The term biochemists use is steric. It's about the shapes of macromolecules, central to their effectiveness. But steric effects exist in inorganic chemistry too.
Life did not invent information, it found it already there all around, as the geometric shapes of things, and how these shapes can do certain things that other shapes can't. It used information, managed it, magnified it, mirrored it infinitely, gave it meaning, and ultimately transcended it with consciousness. But it did not really create a new physical force.
Evolution is well established from observation of evolving organic systems like Covid19, so the proposition in the OP "without evolution" is not an option.
Evolution has been extensively described and documented in detail, in countless studies. It is not theory but fact. The greatest surprise is how quickly it occurs. The evolution of human consciousness is surely something everybody can immediately relate to.
It is easy to forget that everything is evolving, not just living things but the entire universe is in motion and evolving, and emerging, and natural selection acts on everything, not just animate matter, but all matter - it culls non viable form.
This is the mind that you are looking for - that drives better ordered states.
The universe is a self organizing system, and as a consequence, all of its component parts are also self organizing - in an interrelational manner, and according to the constraints and possibilities presented by the situation things find themselves in.
Pockets of the universe that are not chaotic, are ordered ( self organized ). There is no upper limit to this ordering. In goldilocks pockets of order where liquid water is present such as the earth, the self ordering continues seemingly without possibility of end.
Self organization is the driver of evolution, and natural selection determines what survives - this is the omnipresent dynamic everything finds itself in, and I think it is enough to describe how inanimate matter becomes animate. To impress that this is the process we should focus on, I assert that human consciousness is entirely a process of self organization - it is not possible for a human being to do anything outside the purpose of self organization. At the other extreme we need simply to place a boundary around random elements, and the elements within the boundary must self organize - this leads to a notion of how a cell might form.
All that is left is the simple task of describing all the steps in between! :sad:
Read the section under the heading The Chemical Paradigm. It concludes:
Barbieri then remarks 'This is one of the most deeply dividing issues of modern science' - as can be seen in this discussion.
He then proposes the 'information paradigm' which includes this paragraph:
Bolds added. So I think that validates what I claimed he said, doesn't it? That said, Barbieri has no interest in anything supernatural. II read another paper of his where he explained why he resigned as editor of the Biosemios Journal because he thought it had become too influenced by C S Pierce and was drifting towards philosophical idealism ( here.) He is adamantly naturalist, but not reductionist. That's what is interesting about him.
Quoting Tom Storm
I think it's significant that you see the problem in terms of immaterial beings conceived as ghosts or souls. I see that as due to the influence of Descartes' particular form of dualism. As Edmund Husserl notes in The Crisis of Western Science, Descartes' intuition of consciousness as the fundamental ground of existence is profound and basically true, but he errs in treating the 'cogito' as an object, 'a little tag end of the world', is how he puts it.
The way I would explain it, is that the subject, the 'res cogitans', is never an object of cognition, except metaphorically. You can never actually make an object of the knowing subject. And there's no such thing as 'mind', either, except by inference. Mind is the subject of experience, or the subjective pole of experience, but is never an object of cognition, as such (which is why eliminativists insist it can't be considered as real.)
This has resulted in a deep-seated tendency in modern thought which was described by the philosopher Richard Bernstein as:
:up: That is correct. It is not really a material universe as the relationship of information and energy is matter. It is really an information and energy in a relationship universe.
From the original post, Gary Enfield has mistaken the process by which already living species are modified over time, evolution by natural selection, from the process by which life is first made from inanimate matter. Evolution as discussed by Darwin does not create life. Darwin was aware of that.
Quoting Pop
I'm not sure what this means, but the claim that natural selection acts on non-living matter is not supported by any science I've ever heard of. That's my non-dogmatic way of saying it's not true.
Quoting Pop
No. It's not.
Are you arguing that inanimate matte dose not evolve? If so what is your argument? Describe one instance of inanimate matter that has not evolved.
We derive the information of the evolution of the universe from its present state. So the information of the 14 billion years or so of universal evolution is contained in its present state.
The word "evolution" has a very specific meaning in biology. Darwin called it "descent with modification." It is a process that describes how undirected genetic changes in organisms are passed on to an organism's offspring through the mechanism of natural selection. No inanimate matter has evolved in that sense, by definition. If it had, it would be alive.
You seem to be using "evolve" as a synonym for "change." That's incorrect usage in this context.
The argument about biological information is however that organic life retains memory in a sense that inorganic matter does not.
Obviously I'm not using it to refer specifically to biology! I'm saying everything evolves.
Quoting T Clark
You seem to overlook that you are made entirely of inanimate matter - that has evolved to life.
Again, when I use the term "evolution," in this thread I mean descent with modification.
There is no solution to the OP from a dualist perspective. Not even a hint of a solution. There is a possible solution from a monist perspective. It will not work for everyone of course.
I only raise souls or ghosts because they often come up, and these ideas can stand in as place holders for pretty much any claim of access to a different realm outside naturalism.
I've already addressed the limits of materialism elsewhere and that is not the key subject. The subject/question is what can we demonstrate to be the most reliable source of information about the world? No one has offered anything alternate yet other than some vague claims and an undifferentiated whinge about empiricism.
Sorry about that. I'll try and sharpen it up next time.
A lot of measurement is done on the genetic code, eg one can compute the genetic distance between two organisms and derive from that a crude estimate of when was their last common ancestor. Similarly, one can measure the number of words in a novel or count the amount of bits in a computer programme. Codes are measurable alright, with sui generis variables.
Quoting Tom Storm
You are basically an information management system, which is precisely why you need reliable information about the world. A stone wouldn't.
Hi Isaac
Quoting Isaac
It has been shown many times through the action of (say) the enzymes which repair DNA. The same enzymes do different things in response to different circumstances, but always in order to re-create the original strand of DNA exactly, (seemingly a purpose or objective) - despite bits being knocked out and missing from the DNA sequence which they effectively have to re-create. They do this by trying to find other templates to copy, matching them up, and then exactly filling-in the gaps.
That is not arbitrary by any standard. To the observation of even the scientists who discovered it, and who have been desperately seeking an answer to how it is done for decades now, they are exercising purposeful control... even awareness, because the small number of enzymes that do this have to recognise each unique circumstance before being able to fix it.
Quoting Isaac
It doesn't give 6 out of 10 - it is barely able to give odds of 1 in a billion. In the case of forming a single protein (as stated in the OP) it is odds of 1 vs the number of atoms in the Universe (10 to the power 260). We can see that the processes of replication which operate in our cells today have been set up to operate with near certainty, per the laws of physics and chemistry, but when you look at what that set-up represents it pushes us back onto what could possibly establish the base position before life existed and indeed before any known method of evolution. That is the issue I was raising in the OP.
And by the way - you do not do yourself any favours by ridiculing the Laws of Physics and Chemistry - which are, in their practical application very real and the very basis of materialist thinking... (providing one inevitable outcome).... but with limited application.,,, ie. only as far as they claim to apply.
Quoting Isaac
What rubbish! The explanations offered do not satisfy because they have not answered the question being asked. That is plain for anyone to see, (if they care to look), and it is why scientists researching the issue are still looking themselves.
Quoting Isaac
I haven't misunderstood, but your ill informed comment suggests that you haven't looked and are content to go with a myth before validating your comments. From the loophole free Bell Test experiments, to the accelerating expansion of the universe, to the dilemmas around the origin of the universe, the origin of life, navigation within cells, DNA repair, and every example of the use of probabilities within QM - the whole range of science is riddled with examples that seem to break the materialist mould.
Hi OliverS
Quoting Olivier5
My comments are perfectly clear and consistent if you read the second part of the statement I made, rather than just quote the first part in isolation. Chemists can describe chemistry, but if what they describe doesn't answer the point then the issue remains valid.
As in the examples which I did quote, these molecules which, (according to the Laws of Physics and Chemistry), should just do one thing in an inevitable way, are clearly shown to do more than one thing, and even seem to be working out puzzles. They break the rules.
These are single molecules without any other perceived interaction that could cause a different outcome
That's confused verbiage. Give me an actual example or reference text.
Hi Wayfarer
Quoting Wayfarer
It's nice to have a brief non-aggressive conversation about origins ! The original counter to Materialism was Idealism which offered examples from thought that broke the materialist/ determinist principle of causality. I personally wouldn't say that was 'matter and form'.
Quoting Wayfarer
Why do you feel it is necessary to say that 'somebody else' feels it is important. Why can't any of us just say what we believe and give the evidence/examples to support that view? We are all perfectly capable of having our own opinions. What this debate needs is more evidence and examples - not bouncing theories about without any substantive corroboration.
Facts/evidence can say why one theory doesn't work, because the examples break the principles of a suggested solution. If no argument has any evidence, then it is sufficient to state the idea and wait for evidence one way or the other.... although philosophy generally requires the characteristics that would resolve the issue.
In the case of codes - there either has to be a chemical reason why a code should emerge, or some other factor must be driving its emergence.
No chemical factor has been offered for such a thing, (and we can all speculate as much as we want on this - because the properties of chemicals are well described and limited by scientific research). So the fact that there is no current chemical explanation must lead us onto a consideration of what generic factors could drive the establishment of an intricate system of inter-connected codes. We don't need to be scientific specialists in order to do this. But Philosophy has to be practical too.
One bit of speculation is that at some crude level, there might be some degree of awareness and purpose. That is certainly the only way in which we have seen codes used in any other circumstance. And while this is truly a bizarre concept - we do have the evidence referred-to elsewhere in these posts about molecules seemingly adapting their activities for the purpose of an objective. Maybe, in time, this could be tested?
That was a simple example which we might all speculate about. But I was hoping to stimulate people's thoughts on this - to delve deeper.
If you, or anyone else here, can start to apply their minds about what fundamental factors might be necessary (even in abstract) we might begin to hone in on the things that scientists have to search for.
Quoting Olivier5
How was my comment confused?
Oliver I have given the same example time and time again - the DNA repair mechanisms - particularly Homologous Recombination. It is there for you to look up if you care to do so.
I first found it in Finipolscie's book (well explained for laymen), and then followed his source to a leading Biochemistry text book (Alberts) in which scientists give the findings from the latest research.
This was addressed to @Tom Storm.
However, I am interested and would like to reply.
I am not exactly sure what is meant by 'intersubjectively constructed patterns' ?
I think it means something like patterns of behaviour or thought which emerge from experience or awareness shared by others. This would include emotions and motivations, I guess.
And yes, they can be identified, measured and further explored.
The patterns are not 'matter' and can't be reduced as such. They are part of the natural process of life.
We can't understand human life by an analysis of physical components alone.
The origin of life remains a mystery but mystery doesn't necessarily mean supernatural.
It is something strange or not known that has not yet been explained or understood.
I responded earlier, to the best of my ability, to the questions posed in the OP:
Quoting Gary Enfield
Much of established science was a mystery until fairly recently.
It is a continual process dealing with problems which need to be solved.
Neuroscience combines studies of the physical and the mental in an attempt to understand consciousness, amongst other things. From wiki:
How reliable it is would seem to be the question remaining.
As reliable as we can hope for ?
Studying the nervous system can only advance our understanding of biology and function.
It can shed light on what happens when there are problems related to the brain.
If researchers can find ways to prevent or treat e.g. psychiatric disorders by brain imaging coupled with physiological models, theories or mechanisms then that is all to the good.
Understanding to the best of our ability is crucial to maintain overall health and well-being.
Survival, if you like.
And this includes philosophy; reflection and discussion, even if it might be not be considered 'reliable'. For some, like Hadot, it is a way of life...
Thanks to @Gary Enfield for starting this thread. It has been informative.
Hi Pop
Are we talking at cross-purposes here?
Quoting Pop
I have always said that I believe in Evolution once the mechanism got going, (and as stated in the OP - there is only one known mechanism in the whole of existence - the living cell).
The issue is that there is no such mechanism prior to the first living cell. So what could bring life into existence without it? Chemical chance, given the odds, is not an option.
I know that you keep saying that the universe is self-organising, but you never say what might be driving that. I have tried to point out some scientifically proven traits that might illustrate what you are hinting at, but we need to narrow down, through conversation and debate, on what the core characteristics might be to achieve this.
The original theory of evolution talked of 'mistakes in chemistry' to achieve mutations, supported by a selection process based on either general survival or specifically from Thought, (ie. positive selection of a mate with desirable characteristics).
However, if we look carefully, most aspects of survival in any living organism require choices. By way of example, (poached from elsewhere), a bigger more powerful arm would be a hindrance rather than a help without Thought to guide it to achieve better survival. Thought - or at least, whatever underpins it, has been a pivotal factor in the the theory of evolution, and may be even more important before that mechanism kicked off.
Quoting Gary Enfield
Homologous recombination does not break any rule. Rather, it creates a new rule, which is that diploid organisms -- those having two genomes instead of one; two sets of chromosomes, one inherited from the mother and the other from the father of the organism -- can repair one broken chromosome by copying the corresponding section of the other. More generally, in diploids, genetic information can move from one chromosome to the other homologous chromosome in the same cell. This is critical especially during gamete production, as another tool for shuffling the genetic cards, but also in repair DNA in all cells.
This provides an excellent example for where I disagree with the thesis that life breaks the laws of physics. It doesn't, really. What it does is add new rules. Life creates its own set of rules, in addition to those of physics, as it moves along.
You heard of "eat or be eaten"? That's a rule of life that was created the moment one species started to eat another. Predation is a great energy acquisition strategy and once it appeared somewhere, it quickly became a universal feature of the life game, shaping defence and attack strategies by the millions.
Note that predation does not contradict the laws of physics. Rather, it means absolutely nothing outside of life. It is made possible and conceivable only by life itself. You could say that black holes 'eat' stars but it would be nothing more than a metaphor.
Biology does not contradict physics and chemistry. It adds to them, quite a lot in fact. What it adds cannot be understood with the conceptual tools of physics but it does not contradict them.
T Clark
I have looked back at your single post to me at the start of this debate, and you basically said that you agreed with the point that the evolutionary mechanism couldn't account for the origin of life, but that no reputable biologist had ever stated that claim. Fine - but I never made that comment about biologists.
That said - until the emergence of Abiogenesis some 40 years ago, there were plenty of scientists arguing that we need look no further than evolution with a smattering of 'spontaneous creation' re: Amino Acids. Several of these scientists were very eminent, even if you obviously do not regard them as reputable!
Did you really need me to make that point again when others had done so?
The other point you made was...
Quoting T Clark
I was was hoping that you'd since realised this was gibberish and I was hoping to spare your blushes by not specifically pointing it out. But if you insist....
Creationists believe that there is no chance mechanism, and that there is a bigger mind/influence at play - generally a God figure to bring about life.. So your logic is out by some 180 degrees.
You also do yourself a disservice by implying that any argument that challenges the current materialist thinking must be creationist. You are either badly informed or worse, deliberately trying to smear others..... as was also pointed out by others.
To return to your comment, biologists may believe that there is some underlying process that avoids chance - but the fact that Abiogenesis research has failed to come up with an alternate evolutionary mechanism (they are not even close) is not a misrepresentation by me.
Indeed, my example of the 22 Amino Acids referred to the emergence of the basic components of proteins (which incidentally are not simple molecules in themselves), because Stanley Miller's experiments were held out as the excuse for saying that the spontaneous emergence of life was chemically simple and expected - when that was a complete fallacy, put forward by materialists.
You haven't addressed the RNA world hypothesis, though...
Oliver - RNA hypothesis works on the concept that if RNA is the intermediate code between DNA and Proteins, it is likely to come first, and that DNA (a more stable but less reactive form) is more likely to be a later development.
I have no problem with the suggestion, but it's only a theory, and does nothing to explain the origin of RNA or any ability to reproduce in isolation.
It also doesn't explain the origin of the proteins that are the actual work horses of life, which can only be conceived to naturally experiment with each other once they exist.
So no, I don't believe that my summary ignores anything.
Oliver, I find it bizarre that you still don't see the issues.
Quoting Olivier5
The chemistry described says how some chemical bonds can be reformed, but is says nothing about how sterile chemicals - single molecules - identify what might be missing and then go looking for the appropriate piece of code that is missing in order to replicate it (not a simple process in itself).
You just admit that the enzymes are observed to undertake a series of logical steps, adapting their behaviour, but offer no suggestion as to what guides them - when there is no known chemistry or computer to undertake the logical process involved. When one is offered, then fine. But ignoring the issue because it doesn't suit your philosophy isn't helpful.
How can you make a statement like "it creates a new rule" when materialism says that nothing in life can break free of the one set of rules that underpin Matter/Energy?
But there is plenty of that. DNA and their proteinic maintenance machinery has be used to make computers. We come across new mechanisms everyday and we try and understand them. Sometimes it looks pretty much "designed" or "intentional", until you discover how it works.
Then, something funny happens: we can better understand how those biological systems can fail, and how we can repair them when they do.
The issue I have with intelligent design, is that life as we know it fails all the sodding time. These macromolecules can run haywire. Organisms get sick and die as a result. It's been known to happen. I would expect an intelligent designer to do better than that.
And does your theory explain the origin of RNA, pray tell?
What on earth does that mean?
DNA is a static template for a design. It has no logic and just leads to the manufacture of new cellular components using a fixed process with a mysterious and unexplained origin.
There is no computer - so how does the logic of the HR process work, in purely chemical terms? There is no explanation from science - so what did you mean when you said "there is plenty of that".
The whole purpose of the continuing research is because they have found nothing to explain it.
Quoting Olivier5
I have not offered a solution, and as you will see from the other posts - I am wanting us to try to identify the base-level points that need to be resolved.
What I can say, like anyone else who is able to understand the evidence, is that we know that your claims of a certain type of solution are no more than wishful thinking. If you want to prove your case, please try to narrow-in on the factors that chemistry has to solve within your concept.
Quoting Olivier5
... Let me rephrase. You are, among other things, an information management system, as all living creature, which is precisely why you need reliable information about the world. A stone wouldn't.
People (and other species) are probably more than just information management systems. The "information paradigm" is just that: a human, limited way if seeing life. An angle.
Essentialism is a bitch.
It is my philosophy that the Big Bang is a local event in an infinite universe. The vast distances involved, means that the light from the next closest universe has not even arrived here yet. Our universe is only a teenager, roughly 13.7 billion years old, however there are possibly billions of other universes of different ages scattered throughout infinity. It is not possible to prove any of this of course, it’s just a theory, like our current Big Bang, is only just a theory.
I don’t believe it is possible for something to come from nothing and so everything that exist now, has always existed in some form. Forms are constantly changing, no form is permanent, even the sun itself is middle aged and will die out at some time billions of years in the future.
"Spontaneous generation" is another word for "abiogenesis." They mean the same thing. Darwin was very clear in his writings that some mechanism other than evolution by natural selection was required to explain the origin of life. He acknowledged that science in his day had not advanced far enough to discover what that mechanism is. And what the frick frack does "a smattering" mean here?
Quoting Gary Enfield
Here is a link to an article that uses the purported impossibility of life self-generating to support the young earth argument. The process described is similar to the one you describe in the OP.
http://members.toast.net/puritan/Articles/HowOldIsTheEarth_A.htm
Quoting Gary Enfield
A quibble - It is misleading use the word "evolutionary" in this context. It leads to confusion between two completely different processes - evolution and abiogenesis. The heart of our dispute seems to be that you are unwilling to acknowledge that.
As for the rest - Scientists know enough to identify plausible mechanisms by which abiogenesis may have taken place. In 1859, Darwin recognized and acknowledged that science in as "not even close" to understanding the mechanism by which traits were passed from one organism to its offspring. The beginnings of that knowledge didn't become public until the early 1900s. Was that a valid argument against evolutionary theory? If it was valid, it was also wrong, as we now know.
Quoting Tom Storm
If an evolutionary account of life's origins is valid, this is what it has to account for and what chemistry experiments have to generate in some form:
Rudiments of life began as some form of reaction cycle, refined billions of years ago in conjunction with growingly complex membranes and carbon-based molecules until evolutionary independence from fully inorganic features of the environment arose. Though all the molecular parts of recycling biochemical loops were interdependent, these first membrane-parsed solutions, even when their protocells were clumped together, must have been more like an ecosystem than a mechanized factory, with chemical bonds breaking, forming and adaptively transforming as energized quanta of matter flowed at the nanoscale.
This streamlining of dynamic equilibrium was punctuated at times by key evolutionary events, simple subunits of molecular ecosystems coalescing into more complex macromolecules, segments of reaction pathways refined by natural selection for greater efficiency until stabilized as persisting, relatively large three dimensional structures. Evolving macromolecules would have become loci of intramembrane ecosystems, primary drivers of pathways in energized mass that brought overall chemistry into their orbit.
Apex molecules must have reached a stage where structural integrity was no longer especially vulnerable to decomposition via any surrounding chemical reactions, but instead mostly recycled from smaller building blocks of matter or sustained by repetitiously drawing energy out of atoms and radiation in the environment, graduating from basic chemistry to what we might call functional mechanisms. This would have been the beginning of metabolism, primordial macromolecules utilizing quantized matter for replenishment, as nutrient sources.
At some stage, molecules in these metabolic systems gained the capacity to not just generally exploit environments for energy, but also precisely replicate external subunits, which was a huge evolutionary advance, surpassing mere utilization of various smaller molecules to the point of finely controlling their concentrations, regulating nutrient supplies as the first primitive enzymes, a sort of inanimate farming based around feedback mechanisms. Paralleling this outcome, some molecules became capable of introducing to the environment stretches of their own structure, built out of surrounding molecules, the ancestors of RNA.
How these two threads of evolution - enzymatic and self-replicative activity - gelled into a stable genetic system is unclear, but judging from the nature of modern cells, it seems this process must have been complex, as molecules currently carrying out these activities span a rather broad spectrum. The following all exist in sizable amounts: self-replicators and the enzymes that catalyze their reproductive processes, partially self-replicating enzymes in likeness to the ribozyme, and the much greater quantity of enzymes not directly involved in self-replication, but which produce components of recyclitive biochemical pathways.
If we can regard this evolutionary process as having an overall direction rather than serendipitous cooccurrence, a claim about relative progress vs. relative chance which pends further research into modern cells and their processes of adaptation, it seems biochemical pathways generally settled into a division of labor, where some molecules are specialized for self-replication, some for metabolism, and relatively few a limited capacity for both. The most sophisticated forms of this cellular behavior, which are inextricably linked in modern cell types by biochemical pathways, seem to have first evolved in ways that were isolated from each other, in separate membranes, with the fate of macromolecules, already partially streamlined for function, conjoined in symbiotic relationships when cells engulfed each other without digestion as in the case of what became nuclei, mitochondria and chloroplasts.
At any rate, self-replicators advanced from modest regulation of intracellular environments to such precise control of biochemical ingredients and pathways that molecules of RNA and DNA can be analogized to hubs of information storage, the primary blueprints for cellular biochemistry, with DNA molecules duplicated almost exactly upon mitosis and templating most of the astounding variability in an organism’s physiology.
In my opinion, an alternative could not possibly exist, as the intermediate steps will have to be mechanisms of this type, unless we are going to assume some magical hocus pocus causality. Its a matter of refining theory so that our knowledge of causation is accurate, which may admittedly include an element of what is commonly regarded as the spiritual. Spiritual causes are not immaterial, they are natural and must participate in evolution defined broadly as organized, self-selective change in substance. If spirits drive change in substance, that will eventually show up as a facet of the theory of evolution.
Do you have a link to the source or sources for your description? I've read "Life's Ratchet" but I wouldn't mind going deeper.
The source is me! lol If you want to get the whole deal, check out my blog at philosophyofhumanism.com, particularly the posts Quantum Biology, The Origins and Evolution of Perception in Organic Matter and The Nature and Human Impact of Qualia. I admit my writing isn't quite professional polish, but I think you'll find the ideas interesting. Most of my postings are chapters from a book I wrote titled Standards for Behavioral Commitments: Philosophy of Humanism, available for free download at same site.
Thanks. I'll take a look.
Quoting Gary Enfield
Could you elaborate a bit more on your philosophy of science stance with regard to your assertion that facts remain unchanged forever?
Are you saying that scientific progress is cumulative, with every new set of facts added onto the previous body of scientific knowledge?
Are you even qualified to venture an opinion on this subject - what science qualification do you have?
Quoting Enrique
Is there one robust documented example of anything spiritual existing?
That's like asking if there is one robust documented example of anything scientific existing. Science is a way of knowing, not a phenomenon. Ditto with spiritual knowing. Science deals with so-called "objective reality." Spiritual knowledge deals with awareness and internal experience. I'm sure many people don't agree with that characterization.
And now we have crossed the border out of this thread.
You're right, I expressed this poorly. I have no problem with meditation and focused self-awareness and contemplation. Some atheist materialists practice mediation and even accept models of non-duality.
My problem is when people make truth claims they cannot justify - such as there is a higher consciousness that they can access. That there is reincarnation. That there is a soul. Etc. I have no quarrel with people who enjoy Zen mysticism or similar practices and quietly feel better about their lives as a consequence.
I make no claims about God, gods, souls, reincarnation, or any so-called mystical phenomena. I started as a materialist as a kid and I've never gotten out of sight of that way of looking at things. But it is just one way of looking at things. Science does not have a privileged viewpoint on reality. It's a way of seeing things, but not the only, and not always the best, way.
I'm just repeating myself.
I've got the science and philosophy foundation from college, with a bunch of additional reading on the subject. I'm not a professor if that's what your curious about. I'm as qualified as anyone with a liberal arts education and a philosophy degree plus a lifetime of meticulous study.
Quoting Tom Storm
I think its obvious that spiritual phenomena exist, but I presume all of this can be explained naturalistically. As one of the more mundane instances, statistically significant correlation between the brainwaves of meditators has been recorded with EEG, an objectively observed synchronicity.
You're not repeating, you're clarifying. I would argue that science does have a privileged position - that's one area we differ. Can you describe these other was of seeing briefly or in dot points and outline what was seen exactly? What can you know spiritually speaking (or whatever word you wish to use by contrast with science.
You're asking me to describe my whole understanding of reality. Something I've spent the last 30 years thinking about. I came from somewhere probably not very different from you. I was always good at science and math. When I was really young, materialism seemed self-evident to me. I never really lost that. I still get science. After fiddling around for a few years, I went back and got my civil/environmental engineering degree and worked for more than 30 years.
Somewhere along the line I came to see that a materialist understanding of the universe was a small part of the picture. I think maybe it was because my job for 30 years was to know things and know how I knew them. I used to joke that my business cards should say "Environmental Epistemologist." I don't remember how, but I got a copy of Stephen Mitchell's translation of the Tao Te Ching. Things it said seemed just as real to me as science. They felt as if they belonged together as a single view of reality.
That's where I am now. The rest is a long story.
Thanks for that response. My problem is that people feel or experience all manner of things, from the risen Christ to self transcendence and connection with higher consciousness. And being creative beings, people make all-sorts of connections and symbolic meaning. We are meaning making animals - that much seems clear.
Problem is how do we determine something that is real or useful from something which is an internal conscious state, a hallucination, or a belief, or a feeling?
There are atheists like Dr Susan Blackmore and Sam Harris who practice contemplative techniques, mindfulness, mediation, Dzogchen, Zazen - whatever it might be - and they do not come to the conclusion that science is anything but the primary mode of acquiring reliable knowledge. And all their critics will do is resort to ad hominem attacks - 'they are doing it wrong' or 'they are blocked'.
Seems that introspective experiences like intuitions of transcendence have no more impact on a belief in a higher consciousness or the notion of one mind, say, than an LSD trip. And the frequent connection of these subjective experiences to spooky physics and this or that spiritual tradition does not seem warranted.
Does the macrocosmos produce the microcosmos through involution or does the microcosmos produce the macrocosmos through evolution? Does a drop of water produce the sea or does the sea produce a drop of water?
It seems far more logical for the macrocosmos to produce the microcosmsos through involution but it requires a process initiated by a conscious source rejected by much of science in favor of accepting an absurdity as the only alternative.
I laid out all that rigmarole about my history in science and engineering to show I recognize the difficulties in knowing things. I understand the value of science. I understand the sources of uncertainty and doubt. I've dealt with those issues my whole working life on a practical level.
Beyond that, you're asking me to summarize a whole world view in bullet form in a thread not intended for that purpose.
I take your point, however much proof shows that the universe can't be infinite.
Quoting Present awareness
I agree and this fits with the big bang, as one main theory is that quantum fluctuations split no energy into equal ammounts of positive and negative energy, just like how 0=10+(-10).
Some of this energy then gets converted into mass (E=MC2).
Basically, you don't need to say it like nothing=somethimg, you could say nothing=nothing or something=something, it all means essentially the same thing.
Please, anyone correct me if I have got the science wrong here, I am by no means an expert.
To say that evolution acts only on animate matter implies evolution has an ability to distinguish between animate and inanimate matter. Is this what you are suggesting? If so, this makes no sense to me. It makes better sense to state evolution acts on emergence, and emergent properties - consistent with the science of complex systems, whilst self organization creates them.
You broadly asked for a mechanism that might create life. Theories of abiogenesis from the perspectives of biology, chemistry, geophysics, astrobiology, biochemistry, biophysics, geochemistry, molecular biology, oceanography and paleontology all agree that self organization led to life - along an evolutionary path. Again to impress on you that self organization, via evolution, led to life, I state that no living creature, including humanity, can perform an action that is outside the purpose of self organization!
Even God would have to be a self created / self organized god!
" there is only one known mechanism in the whole of existence - the living cell"
That is not so. A living cell is self organizing, but so is any random group of elements within a membrane. That they self organize is a mechanism - an omnipresent mechanism acting on everything in pockets of the universe that are not chaotic. So I think this is where you should start your enquiry.
A living cell may be a highly evolved version of a random group of elements within a cell - I'm not saying I can prove this, but this is one of the possibilities. If the right elements found themselves trapped in a cell and had to self organize, life may well emerge - in the right situation, at the right time.
The elements required are a self replicating molecule ( RNA ), and metabolism ( mitochondria and a membrane that allows nutrients in and entropy out ) . If such a combination of elements found themselves self organizing, from the word go they would be in competition with other similar configurations of elements, so evolution and natural selection would drive better ordered states. As I've previously mentioned there is no upper limit to self organization - it seems to be an open ended process that currently culminates in human consciousness. The process I'm describing is deterministic with a slight element of randomness.
It is difficult to see how this might occur from the materialist perspective of matter in motion. I have come to understand that the relationship of information and energy = matter. So, at the fundamental level, what is combining and recombining is information and energy. From this perspective there is an element of mind at play from the outset. The matter that results is an integration of energy and information, which is near enough to the modern definition of consciousness in IIT theory ( integrated information ). From this monistic ( panpsychic ) perspective the complexity we see at the cellular level is easier to accept, and may in time be possible to understand.
Quoting Olivier5
No - and any rational person would also know that my comments did not say or mean that.
It is perfectly valid to acknowledge that we have not yet reached the end of the investigation, and I have no problem in saying that a conclusion may be reached one day.
My point, which you obviously don't like, is that we use the evidence generated by science to eliminate certain theories of origin because the facts dispute them... and this is what is currently occurring with yours.
Quoting T Clark
For those that lived through the misrepresentations of the materialist community 30 years ago, a 'smattering' was used by them to mean that we just needed all the Amino Acids to form spontaneously (nothing else) and evolution would take over to form everything else... which of course was rubbish on many levels - not least because Amino Acids do not form the whole structure of the key component in replication, (ie. the ribosome).
Quoting T Clark
You leave me astonished that you provided this link, as you clearly haven't read it properly or understood it, because you still seem to believe that they are advocating a solution by chance?
Let me help you. They are, like other creationists, taking the piss out of materialists for suggesting that chance can account for the emergence of life - and having presented the stats in the article, they even say that such an idea is nonsense - proving that God is the only logical way to explain the origin of life..... their beliefs not mine. You really should pay more attention to the articles you quote.
Quoting T Clark
Don't try to taint me with your own failings. I understand the distinctions very well, and I also read things properly. If you had read the OP, you would know that I explained why Abiogenesis, for various reasons, needs to have a perfect replicating mechanism for complex molecules. It currently doesn't have one prior to the living cell. How many more times does it have to be said?
Hi Enrique
Thank you for your long and considered reply. Your description is, of course, quite close to the hopes of many scientists researching Abiogenesis, but it is based on a lot of assumptions, for which there is virtually zero evidence.
I will expand on that in a moment, but I would first like to say how much I appreciated your efforts in trying to establish the key factors we would need to overcome to make it work. I hope you will see my comments below in that light, because many of the terms you used appeared to describe things and mechanisms that were complex from the start.
The debate will only move forwards when we are able to articulate the core factors that are pivotal to any answer, and my instinct is that there might only be a small number of these - enough to get a process going in primordial conditions.
People are often nervous about speculating - but it is only through speculation and subsequent follow through, that we can hope to reveal what may truly be the key factors - so I hope you will re-post with a set of refined criteria - representing the factors that are essential to your vision.
The following headlines are some of the factors that people will throw at you when challenging any solution to the origin of life.. so I ask that you take them in good spirit.
There is no evidence for base chemicals working in the way you describe, anywhere - not in the lab and not in nature as far as we can tell....certainly not in any in hidden corners of our vast environment that have so far been investigated. Your hoped-for mechanisms do not seem to exist.
In the lab, as I understand things, a very simple molecule of no more than a few atoms, (not resembling Amino Acids at all), was able to replicate itself exactly for a very small number of times in perfect conditions (no more that 16 times before it failed). The failure was because the tiniest detail changed and so it no longer worked. Put another way, as soon as it mutated it was dead. So there is certainly no evolutionary mechanism.
Yet it is the only simple molecule that has shown any ability to replicate at all, though it is acknowledged that such a chemical would have no contribution to make to the debate, other than demonstrating a possibility for something more useful.
So there is not even a viable replicating mechanism, even in the lab, prior to the first cell. Without a replicating mechanism your theory is dead in the water.
Even if there was a viable mechanism, it can only replicate what exists and there is no theory on how the first complex molecules emerged in order to then be replicated - ie. in order for them to then find a working partner to provide the biological loops you refer to.
I am not trying to dismiss what you say, I am crudely trying to hone-in on the factors that would allow your theory to work - but I hope that I have illustrated the tip of the iceberg, and why may people seem skeptical of this approach, without being able to offer anything better.
I'm intrigued to see how you distill the essence of your argument.
True, we have not generated what is obviously living from what is indisputably nonliving in the lab, but one would expect it difficult to extrapolate modern cells back to at least 550 million years ago, when the Cambrian explosion happened and macroscopic eukaryotes emerged. But the first signs of fossilized protocells are roughly four billion years old. Three and a half billion years of membranous evolution and colonization is like a zillion bazillion years on the human scale, and we have plenty of evidence that humans evolved from hominids in a few million years, so it seems that its only a matter of how, not if.
It has been documented that amoebas can form symbiotic relationships with bacteria they engulf after only a few weeks of laboratory exposure. Genetic testing proves that the nucleus is descended from archaea, mitochondria from bacteria, and chloroplasts from cyanobacteria, all containing at least remnant DNA. The cytoplasm is full of both DNA and RNA, though we haven't discerned much of its function to this point. Cells are a teeming genetic ecosystem more than a kind of machinery, undeniably having arisen from membranes combining, dividing and engulfing at their characteristic speedy pace to proceed from the chemically simple to the more complex.
How the first cell originated is a mystery and challenging to theorize because the environment must have transitioned from enough chaos to drive a complex metabolic cycle and towards a tamer environment conducive to diversely intricate cellular evolution. This sort of transformation would have been exceedingly rare, but almost inevitable on that timescale.
The best hypothesis I know of thus far is the deep sea hydrothermal vents which etch microscopic wormlike holes connecting larger nodes into surrounding rock while emitting large quantities of organic molecules and fueling a nutrient cycle in likeness to cellular metabolism, with hydrogen ion gradients and exposed metals for catalysis. The first cellular material would have been a film adhering internally to the rock. All this required were phospholipids, a fairly simple combo of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and phosphate if I recall, bonded at near boiling temperatures and studded with sticky organic molecules, to get going. Single-tailed phospholipid membranes self-assemble into cells when full and are extremely porous, so would soon have become overflowing with all kinds of organic molecules. This is probably where primordial metabolism originated.
In a relatively rare event, some of these hydrothermal vents (or whatever the similar energy source was) must have become less agitative, perhaps from seismic activity or distribution by way of ocean currents, so that primordial cells with their primitive metabolism got established in much more favorable conditions. This is where protocells would have become a complex ecosystem, with increasing symbiosis until something like stromatolites formed as the first multicelled colonies.
I'm not a researcher of course, but based on what I've read that's my preliminary thinking!
Hi Gary,
I see that you prefer to view water as a chemical/catalyst enabler.I am more interested in the properties of the chemical element or any other element that had a principal or key role in forming life.
If you go that route, then we can go deeper and say that water and other chemical elements that formed life are made of molecules and atoms.
Each atoms is made by electrons, protons, neutrons etc ... as a conclusion the chemical elements are wave of energy.
Material in my opinion does not exist (is virtual).We call something material if we can touch, feel or see(or maybe matched by a physics formula), but that is not correct.All the five human senses are basically sensors of energy on specific wave length, and also those sensors are made of energy.
You can say the human/animal cells or plants cells are "radars" tuned to specific wave of energy lengths, that work simultaneous only for that specific energy lengths.
These sensors together formed animal or plant "consciousness", which develop in time with evolution after more info and data was gathered by those sensors.
Life cell was not a process that developed in one go, it needed time with a lot of data "pour into" ( evolution).Because of this is very hard, almost impossible to create a "living cell" from zero in a lab. As in one go you can create only a dead cell(with no data/information in it ).
Aliens or other non-earth creatures did not create and did not start the forming of " living cells", the universe and the evolution did it.
Some older posts in these forum of Wayfarer said living cells had consciousness at first, i kind of disagree with that.
Bacteria and viruses are practically wave of energy tuned to specific wave lengths, with no conscience.
They know only one or two things.
In the way bacteria works is like an electric current that can pass trough a wire.
If the wire is cut or it has some isolator in between, the current stops or dies .The similar is with the bacteria as well, if is in water or a good environment with chemical elements they work.
If the environment is broken they die.
The difference is the electric current works at a length of energy and the bacteria has other length(on some bacteria it can be two lengths of energy or more).
One may not split zero into anything, because by it’s very definition, zero energy means that there is no energy there to split.
When you talk about quantum fluctuations, you are talking about “something” whereas I’m talking about “nothing”.
Hi Enrique
Thanks for responding so quickly. I'm glad that my other activities are not so intense at this moment - allowing me to respond quickly myself.
Quoting Enrique
The residues from what is believed to be the earliest cells (based on carbon residues and apatite in rock layers), do seem to date back between 4bn and 4.1bn years. (There are no fossils as such). If correct this means that the emergence of the first cell occurred between 100 and 200m years after rocks cooled to bearable temperatures.
Multi-Celled life based on Eukaryotes began just 800m years ago and since then, I agree that evolution seems to be the mechanism that has driven most of the diversity in life that we experience today.
By implication, it took 3,200m years between the time that the first cell emerged and the first multi-celled creature came to exist. However - all the steps in that evolutionary process were cells, and even the most basic original cell had to achieve the sophistication that we see in the most basic cells today, (whether you choose Archaea or Bacteria). In terms of chemical processes, and the formation of DNA-based replication - they were all fully formed and therefore highly complex mechanism/organisms.
It doesn't matter if you theorise about the nucleus or mitochondria coming as an absorption of other cells - those earlier cells still had to emerge and exist with full functionality from base chemicals.
Quoting Enrique
There is a great deal of DNA whose function we do know, and none of it is computational. A great proportion seems to be unused historic versions of genes which were superceded through mutation.
We do know the different functions of all RNA (at least as it is currently used by cells), and it is generally used to transcribe sections of DNA in a different code, and also to label/tag Amino Acids so that they can be used in the replication process. A small number of specific RNA sequences are dedicated to Ribosomes with their unique functions... and which still have no apparent evolutionary path, (each of the 3 types of cell having their own unique form of ribosome).
None of these chemicals have a computational (computer-like capability) and yet the processes within a cell do contain molecules which appear to rationalise and exhibit traits that have the appearance of awareness - as discussed in other posts. I am sure that this will be a key factor if we can initially acknowledge what is happening. There may be subtle QM effects to explain it in future - but QM displays randomness rather than rationality - so to me that seems unlikely.
In relative terms, the 100m yr development from base chemicals of the first living cell seems remarkably quick, given the timeframes for evolution we considered a moment ago. To me, that suggests that a process must have been in operation - but what? To others it might be evidence for a God - although God does not wish to identify himself. So I am more inclined to explore more mundane possibilities.
If we go where the evidence takes us, something does seem to be providing molecules, and single celled creatures without a brain, with clear abilities well beyond their chemical make up.
If we can distinguish that factor, then we may have a basis for non-chemical influences on the early development of life.... both in terms of the emergence of RNA; proteins to copy; self-replication mechanisms; metabolism etc.
In a similar experiment to Stanley Miller's work on spontaneous emergence of Amino Acids, similar tests were done to see if any nucleotides emerged, (the basis of all RNA and DNA) - entirely without success. (In fairness one nucleobase did appear as I understand it, from one particular chemical mix - but that would not have been conducive to the other nucleobases... and none of the nucleotides.
Indeed, to this day, labs still use living cells to generate nucleotides and Amino Acids for experimentation, as the only technology that we have to synthesis them from base chemicals is : highly elaborate/sophisticated; highly inefficient and expensive; relatively new (within 10 years); and bears no relation to any process in the natural world. Add to that, the chicken and egg situation with protein development and you have a real set of problems.
However, looking for base factors to identify, I quite often perceive that there is an element of 'direction' that is required - eg. to push any evolutionary process in a consistent path towards the reality that we see. Yet we struggle to know what that factor could be.
Without this direction all of your processes could be expected to take one step forward and then one step back - and get nowhere other than through ridiculously obscure odds - which would mean that one occurrence could never realistically be expected to repeat itself.
Hi JoshS
When an experiment produces results, those results become a fact that has to be explained. Other than discovering error or fraud in the reporting of measurements etc., those facts become a permanent and unchanging record - and every relevant fact must therefore be accommodated within any explanation.
How we interpret facts is ever changing as new philosophical ideas emerge - but the facts themselves don't change and it is both misleading and dishonest to only incorporate some facts when presenting a theory. All theories are born out of philosophies that are then applied to facts.
An explanation of facts can lead us to a concept of what may be occurring and we can be so familiar with some theories that we can regard them as fact, when they aren't. As an example, the Big Bang : Big Crunch Theory had virtually been regarded as a fact by many people until it was discovered that the expansion of the Universe was accelerating. Now we see new theories emerging.
New evidence/facts can emerge that can change the emphasis of our interpretation, but the old facts don't go away, and must still be accommodated by any new theory.... however it should be equally true when we see evidence that is not disputed scientifically, (like the process of Homologous Recombination in DNA Repair), it should be acknowledged and not skated over for the purpose of maintaining an old materialist theory that may have had its day.
I say this because the scientific analysis of living processes constantly throws out issues which seem to break the mould of established theory. Until we are honest about that, we are likely to hold ourselves back.
Hi Pop
Quoting Pop
I didn't say that - indeed I think that in various posts I said quite the opposite.
I said that evolution was only possible when the mechanism got going - and the only known mechanism ever, is the living cell.
I also made the point that Darwin and Dawkins both invoke survival and 'positive selection' as a means of accelerating and guiding evolution in a certain direction. Both would seem to require a degree of Thought or Awareness as part of the process... and to date, people have only associated those things with full living entities - whether individual cells or group of cells.
Quoting Pop
Your quote misses the context of the earlier sentence. What I said in total was that the only known mechanism for evolution in the universe was the living cell.... and that is correct as far as I know.
I didn't say that they were the only things to self-organise - although your membrane example wasn't strong in my opinion.
Many membranes are either made of living cells, or they are pure chemicals/fats which have been generated by the cells. It is the cells that evolve not the membranes per-se.
Quoting Pop
I think you may need to re-phrase this as, at headline level, I can't see how a cell be something within a cell. Perhaps you meant that the elements finding themselves in a cell spontaneously self-organise?
Again, you need to provide specific examples because I know that many materialists will say that the chemical paths which undertake the tasks of metabolism and reproduction, conform to a fixed template and follow a sequence that is self-regulating because of the set structures in which they operate (whether membrane channels, or the structure of catalysts and other proteins which act on each other in fixed ways).
This avoids the question of how such structures came about (which is part of the emergence of life) yet you will know that in various posts made by me, I have given specific examples where molecules vary their actions in response to dynamic situations that would seem to break any static chemical make-up. The Laws of Physics and Chemistry say that they should only work one way - but they don't.
However, returning to your point, I am absolutely sure that no matter how long you left them, if you put all the elements that make up a living being in a container, they would probably never make a living entity.
Again - Stanley Miller tried this in the 1950s and just got 5 Amino Acids after decades of waiting, (the same 5 Amino Acids he had achieved within the first 2 weeks of his experiment). Later chemical analysis on the residues from his experiment showed the presence of a few more Amino Acids, but it was suspected that this might be down to contamination.
Other experiments that applied different, more reactive mixes, got more Amino Acids, but never a complete set necessary for life.
The point is, that I feel that chemistry has been shown to fold molecules and position their atoms in particular ways/places because of their sizes and energy levels. This seems to be what happens with crystals and a small number of molecules with a degree of complexity. We also know that gravity can pull material together and this can lead to the formation of new heavier atoms in stars.
However, when you talk about self-organisation, and even information-based activity in the natural world, you seem to be making bigger claims than just chemistry and energy levels, but I can only see your statements. I do not see the underlying examples and logic of what you mean by it. Responding to you without a specific context and examples is difficult, if not impossible.
Hi Adughep
I think that your post deviated from the initial theme of water quite a bit, and you diverted onto....Quoting Adughep
.... by which I think you meant consciousness.
You made a number of points that some people may find rather weird, but I think you touch on some interesting ideas.... if I try to put the gist of what you said into my language.
The nature of consciousness and awareness has not been established by science, and yet we know that they exist in creatures like ourselves - so they are not fantasy. I have also given several examples where single celled creatures without a brain, and individual molecules within cells, can seemingly exhibit properties of logic and awareness.
It may well be that the factor which enables any consciousness can be applied at any level of existence, but with different levels of sophistication.
If so, then your point about interacting energy waves might be one way to explain it. Over time, there would be no reason why the crudest mechanism of interacting energy waves might become more sophisticated and evolve in a separate manner over time. It is one of many possible theories. However you need specific examples to give substance to your ideas if they are to be taken seriously.
We enter the realms of high philosophy if we try to debate whether a conscious influence, (even a very mild one, that is driven by interacting energy waves), came before physical matter.
However, I don't see the point in such a debate unless you want to try to prove the existence of God within interacting energy waves.
I would suggest that all you would need to argue is that the two influences were interacting with each other.
Quoting Gary Enfield
Quoting Gary Enfield
Quoting Gary Enfield
Thanks to analytic philosophers like Quine , Sellers and Putnam, it is now commonly accepted within at least some quarters of philosophy of science that facts cannot be separated from values, that is, interpretive schemes that define what a fact is. So there no such thing as a fact in itself independent of a particular interpretation. Change the interpretation and you change the fact.
Hi JoshS
Quoting Joshs
I'm sorry but I think that is just plain wrong.
If you have an experiment that (say) mixes two chemicals under certain precise conditions, and you then measure the outputs - identifying any new and residual molecules and their quantities, then the results of the experiment are facts that need no interpretation. They stand alone, because that's what happened.
If we then choose to put an interpretation on them, then fine. To that extent, we are agreed that interpretations do change quite regularly.
But if someone chooses to place a different interpretation on the same facts, the facts haven't changed.
This seems particularly true in the realm of QM where there are lots of recorded facts and a lot of very wild theories/interpretations to try to make sense of them. But it is also very true of the analysis of life - the subject of this thread. That is why I am keen to establish facts that we can all use to test 'the next explanation' and be clear about what a new theory has to satisfy.
Hi Present Awareness
Quoting Present awareness
I think there is potentially a good debate here, because various famous names including Steven Hawking, have offered the 'splitting of nothingness into matter and anti-matter' as a way to have spontaneous creation, (seemingly out of nothing), but in a way that preserves the balance of mathematical equations. They do this because they struggle, like everyone else, with matter of origin.
What I don't see, is how this relates to the subject here. If you wish to pursue it, can you either explain how it is relevant here, or set-up a new discussion thread? Thanks.
Yes i was referring to "consciousness" .I edit my post to reflect this word.
I agree that i deviated from "water". I like water, but is only my opinion based on what i read.
Though your topic is about living cell and i did not want to talk only about water.
I think water it is a key or primordial element in forming life only because it can store data/information in it.
Water is also sensible to multiple waves of energy, this meaning it can interact with them(and store that energy waves interaction in it).A metal or a rock cant do that. Crystals have some high energy interaction properties, but is still not like water.
Quoting Gary Enfield
If something of my ideas was not clear i will try to explain again and with examples from real world(when possible.)
Quoting Gary Enfield
I agree with you the above statement, so a big yes from my part :).
I know i need examples, for me is easy to understand that if chemical elements are made by molecules and atoms.
Atoms are made by electrons, protons and neutrons, which "in turn" are waves of energy.
So as a conclusion all we see and feel are waves of energy.
To be able to demonstrate with examples might be a little hard, for some complex things i need to do a lot of waves interactions.
I can give you a simplistic example of waves interactions that result in a object with different physical properties because of these wave interactions.
Ex. When Iron is found on earth using mining it has a type of physical properties.When you apply heat/fire to it or energy wave interactions, it transforms in "steel" with different physical properties.
The same work of process happened on "cells" or forming of "life cells" with higher "consciousness" using wave energy interactions.
Of course these energy interactions frequencies are much lower in living cells. then the ones that are required to made steel .But are still there and are required for evolution.
Quoting Gary Enfield
I dont want to debate on existence of God, i am actually an atheist who believes only in what the universe provide.
I think the above is the main way how "life cells" formed using wave energy interactions when they reached the state of proteins or more complex cells.The wave interaction process is currently ongoing and exists in the present time.
Hi Tom Storm
Quoting Tom Storm
I think that part of the problem here is how you define 'spiritual'.
I find that most materialist label things as spiritual when examples fall outside the abilities of Matter/Energy, and they want to smear a person rather than answer the points being raised.
I believe that I have given examples. As I have pointed out several times, the actions of motor proteins when transporting cargo in containers (vessicles) from a place of manufacture in a cell to another place where they can be used in a cell, across an ever changing structure and road network, is one of the great mysteries. The control factor seems to defy explanation by chemical means and so the computing/logical ability has been labelled as spiritual by materialists wanting to avoid the issue.
I have given another example in the actions of a small number of enzymes repairing DNA in a process labelled Homologous Recombination. As there are again no chemical explanations for what we see, materialists have again tried to dismiss the evidence as wild notions of spirituality, instead of acknowledging the issue, and considering possibilities beyond Matter/Energy.
Adughep was brave enough to look for practical solutions to this. Would interacting energy waves represent spirituality in your book?
The origin of the first cell and it’s evolution, assumes that there was such a thing as a first cell. If matter and life “always” existed somewhere in an infinite universe, there would not be a first cell, just as there is no first minute of time or last number in math, in which one more digit may not be added.
If everything in the universe has always existed, there is no need for creation, simply just a constant changing of forms. Prior to your current form, you were two separate cells living in two different bodies. Our birth is just an arbitrary date in which we left our mothers body, but our existence in one form or another has always been infinite.
I think this might be a flawed assumption. It is completely possible that the first carbon residues were not the protocells which gave rise to the Cambrian explosion. When considering timescales involved, it is completely valid to consider this as possibly more than three billion years.
I also think pinning ourselves to the concept of an amino acid or nucleotide is presumptuous. They wouldn't have evolved from a solution containing only their basic building blocks, but rather in many increments. You might want to consider the existence of a partial amino acid or nucleotide, and that some may have evolved prior to cells, in protocells, and then in the complete cell. All the evolution doesn't have to happen within a single medium, in one fell swoop, and considering the process to be essentially determined by holistic function is fallacy unless some evolutionary principles exist that have not been discovered. We lack a record of the missing molecular links, but it hasn't been disproven that they existed, we just haven't found comparable combinations so far.
As you mentioned in an earlier post, our thermodynamic model of the atom could be suspect, and a refined quantum physics might revise chemistry into something like more morphable energy flow instead of generated by fixed three dimensional structure, necessitating a major adjustment to our conception of how reactions happen and what the range of possibility is.
Scientists have quite easily synthesized single-tailed phospholipid membranes from their basic building blocks in the lab, which combine, form spheres and pinch in two spontaneously, so the basic template of cells has been proven to readily evolve, and probably emerged separately on numerous occasions.
This possible mechanism for abiogenesis has been proposed to Gary Enfield many times in this thread. He has no good response. He just goes on saying that, since we don't understand all the principles of how abiogenesis through self-organization actually works, that's proof that it's impossible. You're just beating your head against a wall.
I had a feeling you guys were going in circles at this point lol
Here’s an example from Nelson Goodman describing the relationship between our accounts of experience and the experience in itself:
“To be objective, the interpretationist points out, one would have to have some set of mind-independent objects to be designated by language or known by science. But can we find any such objects?
A point in space seems to be perfectly objective. But how are we to define the points of our everyday world? Points can be taken either as primitive elements, as intersecting lines, as certain triples of intersecting planes, or as certain classes of nesting volumes. These definitions are equally adequate, and yet they are incompatible: what a point is will vary with each form of description. For example, only in the first "version," to use Goodman's term, will a point be a primitive element. The objectivist, however, demands, "What are points really?" Goodman's response to this demand is worth quoting at length:
If the composition of points out of lines or of lines out of points is conventional rather than factual, points and lines themselves are no less so. ... If we say that our sample space is a combination of points, or of lines, or of regions, or a combination of combinations of points, or lines, or regions, or a combination of all these together, or is a single lump, then since none is identical with any of the rest, we are giving one among countless alternative conflicting descriptions of what the space is. And so we may regard the disagreements as not about the facts but as due to differences in the conventions-adopted in organizing or describing the space. What, then, is the neutral fact or thing described in these different terms? Neither the space (a) as an undivided whole nor (b) as a combination of everything involved in the several accounts; for (a) and (b) are but two among the various ways of organizing it. But what is it that is so organized? When we strip off as layers of convention all differences among ways of describing it, what is left? The onion is peeled down to its empty core.”
One day soon, Sutherland says, someone will fill a container with a mix of primordial chemicals, keep it under the right conditions, and watch life emerge. “That experiment will be done.”
The one thing that is certain is that the contents of the container will self organize - either to an equilibrium state ( solid / steady state ) or in the case of life, a far from equilibrium state ( an evolving process ).
Quoting Gary Enfield
The universe is evolving, and as a consequence so are all of its component parts, not just the living parts. Even a rock evolves from magma, to rock, to minerals dissolved by water, a solution of mineralized water gets zapped by Stanley Miller to form amino acids, and then a cell shows us how certain amino acids can be combined to form animate matter as cellular proteins. Eventually elements of the rock may evolve to become a neuron, and contribute to a comment in this thread. :smile:
To limit evolution to animate matter suggests a predisposition to a dualistic understanding where life is something separate to the rest of the universe, rather then a monistic understanding of how elements of the universe evolve to life.
In my understanding what comes to life is an element of the universe, not something separate to it. Specifically what comes to life is an ordered pocket of the universe. Life could not arise in chaotic pockets, therefore life is caused by orderly pockets where water is liquid. In such situations atoms can self organize to form molecules, molecules can self organize to form amino acids, amino acids can self organize to form cellular proteins, cellular proteins can self organize to form cells, cells can self organize to form organs, and organs can self organize to form bodies. At each of these layers the interrelational evolution of the micro elements gives rise to a synergistic macro element that is an emergent property. This is roughly the complexity theory perspective. In this understanding, life arises out of, and depends on the order external to the system.
Hello Pop,
I think almost the same as you, the element of life can be a rock or a metal.As we see now water looks like a good structure to form life cells.
Though in the universe might be elements more stronger and better then water in forming life.
But the process of forming the "life cell" was not ordered at all.In my opinion the process was made using a lot of failed and chaotic results ( the results of thousands, millions or maybe more attempts).The end result looks ordered to us only because we try to compare it using mathematical or physics formulas. Our human being needs this type of "order" to be able to understand the surroundings where we live and stay.
If I or you were to be born in a small village in Africa, where i know only to hunt using spears or arrows and sleep in a tent.Then my "order of life" would have been my spear and my arrow.
To compare the start of forming the "life cell" as the start when the Earth planet was born is also not so correct.
Is not ok to say even with the start of our solar system.
This is because our galaxy is always moving and it has high chances to interact with other galaxies and to bring debris into our solar system from galaxies or other Milky-way solar systems that where born millions or more years long before our solar system.
If i had to estimate the chances of forming a single "life cell" is something similar with "Rutherford's experiment" .
In the experiment, Rutherford proved the existence of nucleus in atoms.
To be able to do this he blasted gold foils with billions of particles, and a alpha particle had one chance in a hundred million of hitting the nucleus.
If you have a very small chance to form a "life cell", then the process can not be ordered.And i think this is true with every process that transforms or creates something new, very small chances = high disorder.
Hi Adughep, and welcome to the forum.
Quoting Adughep
Yes maybe, I have heard some speculation that the atmosphere of Venus might contain life.
Quoting Adughep
Yes again, some of the essential amino acids were apparently formed under high pressure and temperature. What I was getting at is that the complex multilayered structure of life - atoms forming molecules, and molecules forming proteins, proteins forming cells, etc requires an ordered state. Such constructions cannot form in chaotic environments, because of their delicacy and complexity. So the first thing necessary for life is order and stability ( long period of order ). In a sense what life evolves out of is this order.
Quoting Adughep
Quoting Adughep
I think its just a matter of time before we find life elsewhere. Obviously it requires just the right conditions, but there are so many opportunities in the universe. Perhaps even on Mars we may find some remnants, who knows?
Quoting Adughep
That is the thing, we don't know what the odds are. Even of the 8 planets of the solar system there are three known locations of liquid water; Earth, underground lakes on mars, and under ice lakes on Europa ( moon of Jupiter). If only we could drill in those locations. We just have to wait and see.
Yes you are correct about the end result, as i said in my previous reply the end result have a good order state and balance.
But the long process and time that was required to reach this "order state", that you see now in a "living cell" was chaotic.
If it was "a long period of order" as you said, then most likely our evolution will progress much much faster.
Dont you think that every process that requires a lot of time to finish(millions years) or has a small chance to even exist is because of the chaos and disorder around it ?
I kind of fail to see how "a long period of order" evolution progress is slow, unless it had a heck a lot of chaotic and disorder events.
Quoting Adughep
The opposite could also be argued - That life existed so long is because of the order / stability of the environment.
I guess it depends on how much disorder we are talking about. The Dinosaurs obviously encountered too much, but other organisms were able to cope.
Well yes you can argue and say the opposite, that because of a stable environment the life emerged to what you see today.
But from what we know about our solar system formation process or the geological history of the Earth.
It does not look like early Earth was a stable environment for life formation or that our solar system provided such a good order and stable conditions to create a "living cell".
I' m inclined to think that "the order" and the "life cells" you see today are a process of evolution, (the end result ) and are not something that emerge on Earth because we had from start a "friendly", ordered and stable planet.
Tom
I find myself agreeing with your point about terminology, but my gut instinct is that materialists won't accept any evidence that apparently contradicts their view, no matter how you label it. They are in denial.
That is why I prefer to emphasize issues, rather than labels.
If we are honest about the issues, we may begin to work towards a solution.
Hi Enrique
No matter what TClark tries to imply - no mechanism even vaguely exists within these explanations. It is just wishful thinking that something might emerge in future that conforms to your principles. Yet a splitting membrane does nothing for DNA replication - which is the real issue.
There have been several theories about the nature of the first membrane and there are several simple ones which begin with fatty globules - but strategically they all have to encompass the right machinery which must be one that is already self-contained once it is encompassed.... because there would be little scope for interaction afterwards.
I do agree that some intermediate steps might be possible before the first cell as we know it.
I also agree that we don't know what those steps might be.
I also agree that the residues on the rocks might not be evidence of the first cells - although you are the first person I have come across who is prepared to put that in writing.
However, if those residues are not evidence of the first cell, it would suggest to most people that the origin of life on earth took a lot longer than 100m years. I'm not sure where that would leave us, as it would mean that a driving process was less evident.
But the point I was originally making was that you need the first cell for all of the other evolutionary steps you mentioned.
The trouble with dismissing the emphasis on Amino Acids and Nucleotides is that those chemicals remain part of the only mechanism that is known to work, and as some Amino Acids do form spontaneously, it is hard to imagine that something would 'strive to achieve' other forms through some 3rd evolutionary process. Put another way, I can only imagine that natural processes working towards the first replication mechanism, would use things that exist, not things that have yet to be developed.
People have done lots of research on nucleotides and nucleobases as the primordial 'starter points' for RNA and nothing comes close to a replication mechanism. Dismissing them is wishful thinking until you can find an alternate mechanism.
I am quite prepared to accept another viable alternate mechanism for replication and evolution - but the killer for me is that materialists can offer no mechanism for providing an evolutionary direction even if they do come up with a 2nd means of replication .... as I posted in the OP.
Crude mechanisms for awareness outside the strictures of physical Matter might be one avenue - as Agudhep pointed out - whether it is by interacting energy waves or something else. But most materialists are not prepared to go there as yet.
Your vision has too many gaps. We need materialist thinking to plug a few, rather than deny the gaps exist..
Hi Pop and Adughep
Quoting Pop
Just because Sutherland says it, doesn't make it true.
People have been trying since the 1950s and Stanley Miller's first experiment. They have tried different mixes, different heat, and different re-activity agents - all failed spectacularly to even make all of the necessary amino acids.
As I said before. I think you are better at making your own points with your own preferred & specific evidence, rather than quoting dubious sources.
I would also say that the problem in expanding your 'evolutionary test bed' to the whole of the universe is that the distances are too great, and the conditions too extreme in deep space, to allow anything living to survive for the period and circumstances required to get to our Earth.
I personally feel that if the conditions here were the only ones suitable for life to emerge, within many light years of distance, then you basically have to start your speculation about the emergence of life with processes here - and within the timeframes that science has identified for our solar system and planet.
I fundamentally disagree with you about the nature of evolution. I do not see how you can equate cooling rocks, (which just lose energy), with a process of replication and increasing technical complexity. Magma does not replicate anything. Nor does it become more sophisticated. And while chemistry alone can explain the organisation demonstrated by the formation of crystals; and the nuclear process of suns can forge sub-atomic particles into bigger natural formations, I don't see self-organisation in the sense you imply, before the living cell.
At best, chemicals will make one-off arbitrary changes based on reactions that will occur if they come into contact with other chemicals. Until they achieve a viable level of complexity within the timeframes, they will not create any form of ongoing process for life as we understand it.... unless you have another mechanism to hand.
Put another way - if you wish to keep your timeframes reasonable they can't be based on chance encounters, and simply saying that the universe self-organizes without any process to do so, (other than the inevitable mechanics of chemistry), takes us nowhere that materialists haven't been before.
Quoting Pop
While I suppose I do incline towards a loose dualistic interpretation, it is because certain facts break other models of existence in some fundamental respects. In basic terms - if one type of stuff can't do it, then you either need to change the definition of that stuff, or you need at least two types of stuff.
However, I really wouldn't mind if there was a monist explanation based on physical matter - but if we are being honest about things, the idealist concepts (even if you look at Metaphysical Solipsism), are probably the ones which come closest to a full monist view.
Frankly I am just looking for something potentially viable, rather than philosophical point scoring.
What I dislike are exponents of certain philosophies that deny evidence which counters their preferred view.
If you can explain your concept of self organisation in any other way than chemistry, but within Matter/Energy, then fine we can bring things within a monist outlook - but at the moment you have some big gaps in the thinking which you have articulated here.
Hi Josh S
Thanks for the quote - it must have taken a while to copy out.
I haven't seen it before, but I think Goodman is mixing concepts with no sense of ideological discipline.
He is not recognising the distinction between things that are conceptual and relative vs physical and definable. He evens transitions from where something is, to whether is it an object or not - without logic or context.
I think he is just trying to justify a need for meaning when things might exist without any meaning.
Equally, I do not see how my statement is invalidated. If something is a fact then it is not in dispute and can be something 'firm' around which we can hang interpretation and meaning.
I stand by my comment that "if someone chooses to place a different interpretation on the same facts, the facts haven't changed".
Yes i also did not insist on that. Outside solar system will overcomplicate things, but i wanted to at least say the possibility of interactions with other solar systems.
If we stick only to planet Earth and our solar system, do you think we can say that the evolution of an early planet Earth into a planet that sustains live has a very strong similarity with the evolution of a "mix of chemicals" into a "living cell" ?
Almost the same undergoing processes that transformed Earth, the same were applied to a "mix of chemicals" to "forge" a "living cell" but at a lower scale and maybe frequency too.We can say the transformation for a "living cell" might be fewer then the ones that occur on Earth.
Since all happen in the same place i think the theory has a good logic.
Using the above theory the first cell had no order or stability(i like to call it empty cell or chaotic cell :smile: ) , but after multiple interactions and undergoing processes it became a "living cell".
The same way our planet that at first was chaotic and volcanic, after many transformations process it became the Earth of today.
https://www.livescience.com/64970-early-earth-spin-magma-ocean.html
That is one of the reasons why is very hard to create a living cell from zero or from a "mix of chemicals" in a laboratory .We can maybe create a stage or multiple stages of transformation in a laboratory, but not the whole process of formation or the entire stages that led to a "living cell".
I would agree with @Gary Enfield that alien origin is a long shot, and it just shifts the problem to another planet. I would agree with you that the evolution of the Earth created life, meaning that the early chaos was necessary to create the complex molecules like amino acids, and then subsequently, once a magnetic field developed, and when some stability / order eventuated, complex configurations of these amino acids could self organize due to finding themselves in a situation where they had to.
Quoting Gary Enfield
I'm glad that you acknowledge self organization in amino acids. This is the foundation of life - where inanimate matter becomes animated. If we then jump from the beginnings of life to its ultimate achievement - human consciousness, I think you will agree that it arises from self organization, for the purpose of self organization. Also all the layers of the system in between are self organizing, as are their component parts - amino acids self organize to form proteins, the self organization of proteins forms cells, the self organization of cells forms organs, etc., etc. When an organ is transplanted, the donor organ is not reconnected to the nervous system, as that is not currently possible. The organ carries on working regardless - it knows what to do as it is self organizing. Systems like the immune system are entirely self organizing. Components like a white blood cell work independently - untethered to a system of control. The entire system as a whole, as well as all of its component parts are self organizing!
How can self organization occur without consciousness? I don't think it can.
I think it needs to be understood that everything exists in a relation to something else. Indeed everything exists in a relation to a multiplicity of externalities. It is not a static relationship, but an evolving one. So everything exists in a process of interrelational evolution - both the living and nonliving evolve through a process of interrelational evolution. If this is true for everything, then it is also true for the first living cell. This gives me the confidence to state that the first living cell arose through a process of interrelational evolution - simply because no alternative of being exists!
As a number of people have stated, the multifactorial mechanism of a living cell could not have been created in one hit - it requires an evolutionary process.
One way of Answering the OP would be to raise the profile of what is happening at the evolutionary level by showing how interrelational evolution is a form of information integration, cognition and action, and at the same time lowering the profile of human consciousness by drawing correlations between what is happening at the evolutionary level and at the human consciousness level. In the end concluding that self organization in the process of interrelation evolution is a form of consciousness – that is ubiquitous! So concluding with panpsychism.
An idealist panpsychism, that can not become solipsism as it is in a process of interrelational evolution, so absolutely cannot condense down to a singularity as it relies on a relationship with externalities for its existence.
Quoting Gary Enfield
It is not about point scoring. It is more about the constructivist curse - we can not see that which is outside of our consciousness. To see some things, we need to alter our consciousness - and that can not happen overnight, nor due to another persons opinion, and in some cases it is a total impossibility for reasons of self organization / consciousness.
I can relate to your questions as I also began asking the same questions some time ago. Philosophers I have mentioned to you - Verala, Thompson, Theise, and Capra, are all biologist philosophers who were also confronted with this conundrum at the cellular level, and in the process of trying to understand it had to create new interpretations.
This is the other interesting thing about cellular complexity - that an understanding requires a shift in paradigm. I wonder how you will go. You haven't hinted at any conclusions as yet?
Thank you for the ideas, i agree with the above words you said.
Using your words i prefer to give a more simple definition to human "consciousness" .
The human "consciousness" is an ordered organization of "living cells" from the result of multiple stages of evolution of multiple complex cells.
As you said before bacteria also has "consciousness", but you can not compare it to humans.
Bacteria "consciousness" is a lower or under-evolve evolution stage of complex cells.
A small reptile also has "consciousness", a dog too has one , but is lower or maybe not lower just different evolution of the "living cells" apart from the evolution of humans cells.This is the reason i prefer not to use the word "consciousness", as we might try to compare with human "consciousness" levels which is not right and correct in this contexts.
Reading some science news on internet i saw today an interesting article, which i believe you want to read.
It specify the formation of phosphorus from lighting bolts on soil clay.
https://www.sciencealert.com/lightning-bolts-could-have-delivered-a-key-ingredient-to-start-life-on-earth
That might support my idea that the living and complex cells are at base multiple waves of energy or maybe not ? :)
:up:
Quoting Adughep
Yes I agree to a large extent. Consciousness is something unique even between individuals - no two can have exactly the same manifestation of consciousness, so when compared between species the differences grow exponentially. But consciousness = self organization, and all living creatures have a system of self organization ( are a self organizing system ).
Quoting Adughep
I agree with your energy wave idea, and am playing with a similar concept myself. The way I see it is that matter is not fundamental. The relationship of energy and information = matter, from E=mc2. From this view matter is an emergent property that arises from the relationship of energy and information. So there seems to be a fundamental capacity in the universe to integrate energy and information into matter, and the integration of information is the modern definition of consciousness, so this reveals a universal system of self organization that is equivalent to consciousness, which would suggest panpsychism.
Regarding the article. That is how Amino acids are created in the lab. Mineralized water is zapped with electricity, and eventually amino acids form.
** In physics, systems are driven to maximize entropy production. According to Boltzmann, "systems move in the direction of increasing entropy because such states have a greater number of configurations, and the equilibrium state of highest entropy is the state with the greatest number of molecular configurations."
If we can imagine various amino acids trapped in a membrane, where they have to self organize, and there is a predetermined direction of self organization towards greater complexity, then this provides a model of how cellular proteins might have evolved initially. It is a viable explanation and answers how life might have arisen, but when asked why did this occur? physics can only provide another how explanation. It can not answer why! Physics answers how, not why. The why, however, can be answered by saying that this is how the universe has self organized.
My interest is consciousness, and in trying to understand it I arrived at a definition: consciousness is an evolving process of self organization. Of course this begs the question of what is self organization? and as I try to understand it, all I am seeing is consciousness. That consciousness = self organization may be the only way to define them. Of course self organization and consciousness are both an evolving , open ended, processes - they elude definition as they are continually growing, and what they are today will emerge into something different tomorrow, so absolutely cannot be defined in terms of their product ( what they are ). The best that can be done is to define them as an expression of a system - to say that everything is part of a system, and all systems express self organization, where self organization = consciousness. So conclude with panpschism, to the best of my understanding.
I will not called it matter.I know that is the formula for matter at is defined by Einstein.
But lets called it another type of higher frequency energy instead of matter.
So then "The relationship of energy and information = another state of higher(or different) energy" .Is not necessary that the result to be a higher energy, it can result in a different energy type (lower or higher).
Is the same principle when using a beam of light, if you amplify it and excite the electrons ( you add information) it becomes laser.
The same principle applies to cells when they evolve into something new, just with other types of energy levels.
I am not sure what you want to find. You want to know the purpose of life ?
I am trying to understand consciousness. I think I have a pretty good understanding in terms of phenomenology psychology, and belief systems, and now am trying to understand how it fits into the big picture / how it creates the big picture.
Quoting Adughep
Thanks for this, I was not aware. So if we change either the energy or the information, then a different pattern results. It is still matter - as different waves of energy propagating over something material / or a field. And ultimately everything is really just patterns of energy - pattern upon pattern in a space that is a pattern. Patterns of energy interacting with each other and perhaps changing their information in the process - could this be a fundamental information exchange?
If so then it is"discrete patterns of interacting energy exchanging information" that would have to self organize, as this is what happens in pockets of the universe that are not chaotic.
Quoting Adughep
Wikipedia ( on self organizing systems ): "The process can be spontaneous when sufficient energy is available, not needing control by any external agent. It is often triggered by seemingly random fluctuations, amplified by positive feedback. The resulting organization is wholly decentralized, distributed over all the components of the system. As such, the organization is typically robust and able to survive or self-repair substantial perturbation."
Yes this is my understanding after reading multiple articles, it is not something that is presented in a science document.Maybe others in this thread might not agree or think otherwise.
Quoting Pop
In my opinion, what you want is somehow related to finding the purpose of life.Which is a hard subject and might need another topic open.
I think is "natural universe" the reason "why" the cells are trying to form something new.
When you have two very big environment that are very "messy" and you collide them.The zillions of particles and the energies you gather, then the better the chance to form something new.
Since the environments are very messy, they dont have a limit : there is no time limit or a space limit.Only the stages of ordered cells have a time and energy limits, everything else does not.
Because of so many energy interactions and no limits, messy energies and particles can always form something new.
"Why" they work like this, for now i dont think there is a logical reason for it.
Is like asking why some "living cells" evolve into dinosaurs or why "living cells" evolve into birds, dogs or humans ?
It is a hard topic, like consciousness, which I used to think was impossible to understand, but I found as I keep on trying I continued to make progress, admittedly at a snails pace, but progress nevertheless, so I can not give up now. The ideas touched upon in this thread, which are still fairly fuzzy in my mind, need to be integrated and elucidated to a simple understanding accessible to all.
That consciousness can be defined as an evolving process of self organization, and that the universe and everything in it belongs to a system that is an evolving process of self organization, hints at an answer as to what it is all about, IMO.
Quoting Adughep
Every why question pertaining to natural phenomena can be answered by self organization ( more or less ). Why does a fish have scales? - self organization. Why does a dinosaur form here and a human there - self organization. Why is the universe just so? - self organization!
What do you think self organization is?
“ Electrical sparks simulated lightning to provide energy. In only about a week’s time, this simple apparatus caused chemical reactions that produced a variety of organic molecules, some of which are the basic building blocks of life, such as amino acids” https://bioprinciples.biosci.gatech.edu/module-1-evolution/origin-of-life/
We are all chemicals interacting with other chemicals.
I wonder what would happen if we solved the question of anabiosis and actually managed do create it in a lab. I suspect the debate would hardly change.
They’ve actually been able to create cells from inorganic “Scientists in Scotland say they have taken their first tentative steps towards creating 'life' from inorganic chemicals potentially defining the new area of 'inorganic biology'.” https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/09/110915091625.htm
I think self organization in cells is interaction between : two same cells, two different cells, or a single cell and the environment where the old and the new "information" resulting from the interaction is preserved.
Every interactions that preserve the old and the new resulting "information" , will come together and form a new ordered structure.
When this type of interactions happen you might even call it a stage of the evolution process.
In my opinion the Universe gives priority on interactions (of any kind) that preserve the old information.And to interactions that destroys "the old information", it makes them start back from basics.
Yes, I can see why the information would have to be preserved, and at the same time a closed system would have to move in the direction of greater complexity ( due to the entropic principle outlined earlier ). So the information exchanged becomes more and more complex. Is this process enough then to be captured by evolution and progressed from there to something self sustaining? I suppose, if not, then the process wouldn't survive.
I think what is significant is that it is information that is being exchanged ( as energy or form), and so ultimately it is the exchange of information that must become more complex, and self sustaining?
Quoting Tom Storm
Yes , this is the flip side of the coin, in that ultimately consciousness must decide what consciousness is. :smile: Or to put it another way - self organization must decide what self organization is! And when it does it must do so in a self organizing manner - so cannot change overnight. Changing one's self organization is a big deal in psychology. So integrating new understanding has to seep into consciousness over long periods of time.
Quoting Becky
Yes, this is how it is traditionally understood. In the last 10 - 15 years these chemical reactions have been illustrated as molecular interactions in animations, and what is astounding is the level of complexity a chemical reaction can take. The complexity seen begs the question - do these chemicals have mind?
I haven't been following the issue except via the odd smattering of media coverage. I have to say the origin of life has never been a preoccupation of mine partly because I don't think a scientific proof will change much. But I do own a fossil stromatolite from Western Australia which I got after seeing a lecture by physicist Paul Davies on the origin of life - stromatolites on Oz being the oldest known instances of life. It strikes me as amusing that most life on earth remains microbial. We don't seem to care for it.
That is true, mostly we don't seem to care for it, except when we realize that human cells are eukaryotic cells, and that their self organization entirely creates us and ultimately forms every post in this forum, as well as all of life and its creations. You would think as philosophers we might take an interest?
Yes looks that to be the main reason for many other interactions things, you can even say the main purpose of the evolution is to preserve the exchange of information.If some cell did not evolved into something more complex, it means it could not preserve the old information anymore.
Hmm thinking more that is the core for business relations and personal relations in humans. You get "in love" if the other person has something that you are "craving for" or some new things about he/she "attracts you".
"Love" actually tricked us into think that is better, then the cells started to release serotonin and adrenaline .. hahaha, maybe i am going too far :).
An article that adds more support to the idea of passing information to newborns: https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-have-discovered-a-new-way-fathers-pass-inheritable-information-to-their-children.
Can you elaborate on this a little? I can see how all elements of the system must continue to evolve interrelationaly, in order to preserve the system - is this what you mean? This occurs at all levels of the system - each level plays a role in maintaining the whole. Each level solves its own idiomatic problems, this would include buisness and love, but all levels have only one manner of being as a self organizing system in the process of interellational evolution.
What is interesting about the article is that the system does not fail totally due to folate deficiency, but institutes a workaround by configuring itself differently. And this different configuration is passed on generically. So the information of how the system was effected ( how it changed form ) was preserved, unfortunately not all the story that caused its change of form, is preserved in the form. Still the continuity of information is evident, even though we can not decipher it totally.
This would mean that the original information that created the system would be preserved in the form of elements of the system somehow. The RNA hypothesis seems pretty strong to me. It did not self replicate, according to Stuart Kauffman, but copied its neighbour RNA, whilst at the same time its neighbour RNA copied it! Its easy to see how out of this relationship DNA could evolve as a double helix of RNA.
Yes you are correct, that i had in mind.
For example you got simple cells that preserve basic information.After multiple stages of evolution you combine multiple cells into something more complex(an organ or maybe a complex protein).
But each cell from that complex "organ" has the role to preserve its specific part of the information, as a hole the organ role is to preserve the information combined of all the cells.This is the definition how complex information is stored.
Quoting Pop
Yeap, only the information resulted from the interactions was preserved.The causes can be many, but to the evolution process that does not matter, its focus is only to the end results.
Quoting Pop
Yes the original information is there.
I think yes you are right about RNA see https://phys.org/news/2021-03-lab-closer-life-earth.html.
There is also a theory called "memory of water" with DNA teleportation sustain by Luc Montagnier.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_memory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_teleportation
You have two recipients of water: one with water + DNA sample, and second recipient with empty water.
If you put them close(but not real contact) and you spin them using centrifugation, so each sample can emit electromagnetic fields . After some time the electromagnetic result can be replicated into the empty container and after DNA analysis of the empty container, they found DNA is present there as well.
So the conclusion is the DNA from the first container got replicated to the empty container without physical contact, only by electromagnetic fields.
See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8VyUsVOic0 -- this is an interesting documentary, which will explain some things about water memory better then me
I believe that the evolution main purpose is to preserve information, so it can evolve maybe in something better or more complex.It does not matter how you evolve and what caused it(that's why the causes are not stored ), but if you have new information it tries to keep it if it can.
If the interactions can not be stored, then the data is destroyed and most of the times the sources of the interactions are destroyed as well.
This would be sensational! But it has been 11 years and nobody has replicated it, and it seems a very simple experiment to replicate, so I don't have much confidence in it. :sad:
Quoting Adughep
I would largely agree with this. It would mean preserving the first bit of information is what life is all about :smile: I wonder what it is? I would guess relationship, since you fundamentally need at least two things to create information, where one thing informs the other, and subsequently everything exists via interrelational evolution. This is also consistent with the view that the minimum requirement for an emergent property is a relationship.
For some reason my system did not update for your messages over several days and I had assumed that the subject had gone cold.
I still need to read all of the posts - but from the early ones which I saw, I would like to say that the 'self-organisation' of chemical elements into molecules as complex as Amino Acids, was always portrayed by materialists as a purely inevitable result of their chemical structure and the energy levels within the molecule that forced other elements to come in and fill the appropriate gaps.
That always seemed, to me, to leave a step in the conceptual logic unanswered:- ie. why other elements didn't fill certain gaps in the molecule, instead of the same chemicals for Amino Acids each time.
If we add to that, the continuing questions about the source of the unexplained observations from nature and lab experiments, that cause seemingly impossible effects within the confines of matter/energy alone, then it seemed to me that there was at least one factor missing in our equations. That in turn might be the missing factor/influence for crude awareness, all the way to the Mind and Consciousness.
Technically such a suggestion made me a 'dualist', even though I didn't necessarily attribute god-like status to the missing factor, and I was thinking of something more mundane.
However the announcement today from CERN about the discovery of a new, previously undetected, force exerting a mysterious influence of unknown origin - could be the first evidence of that missing factor to explain everything we have been talking about!
If information preservation is fundamental, then everything is integrating information. This is consistent with the modern definition of consciousness ( information integration ). It occurs through self organization. Self organization is caused by external elements. Self organization creates a self, entirely from elements external to self. The only thing that belongs innately to the self is the information it preserves. The information is stored as a pattern of materials. Simply put, the information is the arrangement or pattern of materials. In the case of living things it is an animated pattern of materials. The animation is itself an emergent pattern. Life is an animated pattern. An animated pattern is a process.
Does this make sense?
Quoting Gary Enfield
I cant see anything on their website?
Quoting Pop
Pop - I got it from the BBC headlines.
Pop & Adughep
Looking over your recent posts there was a strong emphasis on the nature of consciousness and the way in which the underlying, but unknown, mechanisms which might create it, influence the development of life.
Can I ask that when delving into that subject, you separate the factors which existed before the first cell (first life as we know it), from the evolutionary developments that occurred afterwards? I find it very confusing when the two are blurred.
Almost everyone accepts evolution as a process of change and increasing complexity, once the first cell existed - but things must be very different before life - without an alternate evolutionary mechanism - just basic chemistry (with lightning or without it).
The scientific method is always to try and break processes down into their fundamental components, and people have, in their different ways, distinguished between factors that might combine to generate consciousness. I felt that your discussion was weakened by treating consciousness as a single thing.
Finipolscie talks of 3 components - Awareness, Control, and Thought.
I think he settled on these three because they are all scalable, and seem to reflect different properties that could potentially be attempted by mechanical/chemical processes.
Other authors may find different ways to sub-divide consciousness, but ultimately an explanation must be found in the basic processes of nature.... and I don't see you focusing-in on what the necessary base-level requirements might be.
Whether you go via interacting energy waves or some sort of influence from this new force, what do you hope it/they would bring to the party?
Hi Becky
Quoting Becky
Quoting Becky
Hi Becky - as has been mentioned elsewhere in this topic, the variants of Stanley Miller's experiments have never achieved all of the necessary Amino Acids from one original chemical mix, and literally NONE of the necessary nucleotides have been produced. From this you can't even construct a single protein, let alone an entire cell with all of its complexity.
That argument still holds true for the experiments in Glasgow, if you read the article. They are hoping for breakthroughs but are not even close yet.... and similar experiments have been attempted for decades.
The difficulty that you face with your argument from base chemicals is that there is always a conceptual point for which no chemical solution can be expected, because the issues break the principles of Matter/Energy as we know them - from codes, to control, to a direction for evolution.... the things that you didn't discuss.
This is why Pop and Adughep are talking about controlling influences similar to consciousness.
The newly discovered force may help to introduce a missing factor into the mix, but in the meantime do you have any thoughts on the difficult bits?
I don't see how? It may explain the cause of asymmetry giving rise to matter, if confirmed in ten years time or so, but otherwise nothing new.
Quoting Gary Enfield
Quoting Pop
Quoting Gary Enfield
Quoting Pop
Everything evolves. Nothing stays still. We are trying to describe how inanimate matter might evolve to animated matter. We have honed in on how information plays the central role. Please read over the thread.
Yes it does for me. :up:
The last phrase might be a little confusing "An animated pattern is a process" ? maybe you can say more details about the process.
You will need all the phrases, if you want it explained to someone else.
Yes we are treating it is a single thing, but with different levels of evolution. Finipolscie consciousness is near human level of complexity or animal level.
That's why i said in one of my posts that we should not confuse it with human level of "consciousness".
I and Pop agreed that a molecule, cell or a small bacteria that can gather by itself information from the nearby environment (or from interactions with other cells) and can evolve into something new has a low level of "consciousness" .If this word might be too confusing, you can maybe try to find a better word for the above sentence ?
If everything is subject to interrelational evolution ( and I can not see how it can not be ) then so would be the emergent property of action. When inanimate amino acids are combined in a certain pattern an emergent property arises - the property of action / movement. This property then becomes subject to interrelational evolution. The now acting cellular protein, along with its action, must evolve to something self sustaining otherwise it can not survive. The action must evolve to a pattern of action or a series of steps - a process - that is meaningful for its survival. A pattern is information. If information is being preserved, now a pattern of action is the information being preserved. An interacting pattern of information - interacting with other patterns of information, is information processing!
According to Fritjof Capra: " cognition is a reaction to a disturbance in a state". He means this is for all forms of matter - living and non living.
So If we put all these together we get a sketch of how interacting patterns of action must self organize to something self sustaining - if they are successful they create a form of mind! If they are not successful then they do not survive - so there seems to be an evolutionary imperative towards mind in certain Goldilocks situations.
The principle of system wide cooperation from simple action is demonstrated in this video and here.
Thank you for the explanation.
I understood what you meant by "An animated pattern is a process" by itself, but i thought you wanted to add a little more to make it clear for everyone. :up:
I knew you would understand, and I imagine there is only us two left who are interested. And I think we have reached a rough understanding of how life might have evolved. What is interesting is that a form of mind evolved before what we would consider life. :smile: which is consistent with all abiogenesis theory, and the notion that self organization led to life, but is not the typical understanding.
Thank you for the preservation of information insight. This fills a gap in my understanding. Normally I would say self organization forms a self, but this can not occur without the preservation of information. Fundamentally it is the preserved information that forms a self, thus enabling self organization - the interrelational evolution of a pattern of preserved information. The self being a pattern of preserved information. And it is easy to see how "the self " in psychology is really just a complicated pattern of preserved information.
Pop / Adughep
I am still unclear about what you are saying. Perhaps you are trying to say that information is a distinct thing in its own right and that consciousness is merely an expression of this underlying information.
If that is really what you're saying then I think that is a big leap - even if it may be one form of the Idealist perspective - which tended to use Thought instead of information.
I did not perceive that overlapping energy waves were necessarily information.
They could just as easily be a quick way to explore possibilities to find the most stable form/combination of physical things, quickly.
Put another way, there is nothing to suggest that physical existence is dependent on such an information base - and if Matter/Energy can exist independently then there is no basic requirement for an information layer to existence.
In the same way that a car collision detector can be aware that 2 objects have collided, it is possible in physical terms, to have a level of awareness without consciousness or information. Hence the need for more simple building blocks - based on purely physical mechanisms - not information.
However if you are then saying that some emergent property can develop an information capability from some sort of physical interaction, then I would point out that there is still a difference between stats and facts vs interpretation and purpose - which you are implying by suggestions of self organisation.
I suppose it is difficult to understand if you are unfamiliar with information and self organization theory. It is not necessary to understand them fully - I certainly don't, but a basic understanding allows one to apply them to topics such as this and derive some understanding that is not possible with more traditional theory. I would encourage anybody to familiarize themselves with these theories as they have filled substantial gaps in my understanding.
Quoting Gary Enfield
Materials are composed of information and energy. The relationship of information and energy is matter.
E=mc2, energy equals mass, only matter has mass, but matter also contains volume and shape which the mass is distributed over – these are information. There may also be other as yet undiscovered factors that contribute to matter, but whatever they may turn out to be will also be information. Everything is information, and everything is self organizing, so everything is self organizing information! This is the underlying element that materialism does not generally recognize.
I imagine impressions like this is what led people like Planck, and Schrodinger, and others to believe that consciousness is fundamental, and Fritjof Capra to state that "the basic unit of cognition is a disturbance in a state."
Once one starts to think like this then one can start to see a viable evolutionary path from inanimate matter to animate matter via information integration, and preservation, and the emergence that may result in the process.
Pop
As you will have gathered from my other posts, I do believe that various effects in nature, (beyond any man-made influence), point towards some basic levels of awareness, control, and even consciousness which in turn suggest some additional factors in existence that have not yet been explained by the official models of science.
That is why I was excited by the recent preliminary findings from CERN, about a 5th force in nature that was previously unknown.
However it is not clear that those unexplained 'awareness' influences were present from the start of the Big Bang, or evolved from Matter/Energy at some point later.
However, materialism/determinism does have a large degree of validity within purely physical realms, and those who say that such principles apply to everything, may yet discover evidence that proves them right.
I do like that you have been trying to narrow-in on base factors that may resolve some of these issues, but you lack evidence which would disprove other possibilities, and have an inclination to follow the option of an 'information layer' even if that isn't proven.
A lot of organisation in the universe, including shapes, has been explained through physical factors, including competing energies/forces. Your leap to an information layer of existence, (plus some factor that can rationalise and shape it), may be true - but it is a big leap none-the-less, given the level of evidence available.
I was not familiar with the concept, before you mentioned it, but self-organization theory appears to convey the idea that a system without innate orderliness will attain order by virtue of the constant influence of factors from the environment. Or, as you said, the internal organization will reflect exterior factors. Note that this is recognized by abiogenesists. That is, they recognize that life emerged due to the availability of factors, such as energy and overabundance of carbon and radiation, among others. Certain supporters go even so far as to conjecture that it was inevitable development to produce life, whatever the contingent initial conditions of the chemical substances were, although I am not sure that I would go that far.
Note that what you called information here, if I have understood you correctly, is probably better termed state. It is a small concern, but I think that conventionally information is considered a relation. And in information theory, there are two related terms, mutual information, and conditional entropy.
I don't want to butt into the discussion. I took a peek and realized that what you describe as consciousness is very similar to how I would describe it in panpsychic and pantheistic terms. That is how I should convey their idea, if I were to elaborate it today. I even wrote a post some days after yours, where I summarized my position. I am merely entertaining the idea as a hypothesis, not a claim. Not even a conjecture.
P.S. Enactivism might be interesting to you, but I should say that I am not familiar with it either.
Please feel free to add to the discussion, and please provide a link to your description of consciousness.
In my understanding, self organization = consciousness. Self organization is a god like term, as far as I can see, in that it can fill all of the explanatory gaps traditionally filled by god.
Quoting simeonz
Yes I am referring to a state, that has self organized due to relational evolution. @Adughep has suggested that it is information that is being preserved, and I would agree, in that the preservation of information is necessary to create a state. So fundamentally it is the 'preserved information' ( as a state ) that is evolving relationally. The preserved information creates the self in self organization.
In complexity theory it is local interaction, energy fluctuation, or vibration, that spreads throughout the system causing a system wide state, which then has to evolve to a meaningful self sustaining process, in order to survive.
So in the end it is a panpsychism that I'm trying to describe, so I would be interested in how you have described it.
I don't think it is such a big leap. I think the complexity being described by cellular imaging in recent years really brings home the fact that Dualism and the materialism that follows are logically flawed. Cellular biology is far too complex to be the result of chance alone. There is an underlying element of self organization - that materialism does not acknowledge - can not acknowledge if it is to preserve Dualism!
One truly wonders when will the penny drop? For the biologist philosophers I previously mentioned, the penny dropped quite some time ago!
Hi Pop
I think there is a misunderstanding about Dualism here.
If the 2 main monist views are either that :-
a) there is only physical Matter/Energy (Materialism) or
b) there is only Thought (Idealism) which can fashion our imaginings and give a perception of solidity,
then an' information layer' as you describe it, which shapes everything, is either close to the Idealist view, or a full embodiment of the Dualist perspective.
Materialists are not dualists.
Our views differ, in the sense that I do not postulate any new empirical relations. I haven't elaborated much either way, because the point was to defend naturalistically compatible emergence of phenomenological experience. I would concur with you that dynamic systems in nature have attractor points that are more organized then their initial conditions, but I think that this is accepted by contemporary science. As I said, I believe that for the case of the first biological systems, abiogenesis is relying on this idea, when hoping to prove the arrival of organics from pre-biotic chemistry. On the other hand, it is well known that thermodynamic entropy is bound to increase globally. Therefore conditional entropy between systems will increase, and information expressiveness, or order is to be lost. Terrestrial life sustains order, because we still have low entropy energy sources. For biological systems, it is predominantly from solar radiation, and for our technology, it is predominantly fossil fuel and atomic energy.
As I said, it follows a different venue and does not postulate new empirical relations, but if you are still interested, here is the link.
Quoting simeonz
Quoting Gary Enfield
Interjecting in again, but I should disagree. The distinction between pantheism/panpsychism and metaphysical idealism, the way I see it, is that that the former conjectures mental state articulated by immutable or quasi-immutable constraints, acting on the relations between its constituents, whereas the latter considers these constraints as just cognitive elaborations of ephemeral experiences. Dualism proposes that the immutable constraints exist objectively and permanently, but are not between the constituents of the mind, but between the constituents of another substance that the mind supervenes. Idealism and pantheism/panpsychism are both substance monism indeed, but their treatment of natural law differs. It is epistemic in essence for the former, and ontological for the latter
If anyone responds to this, I want to take a short break, so do not be offended if I don't answer speedily.
Reading over my previous comment I can see where the misunderstanding is. I was really meaning Cartesian dualism, where the mind is immaterial, and all else is material / mechanical, as the materialism that pervades western culture. You are correct, strictly speaking materialism is monist.
My understanding is panpsychic, in that there is an element of mind in all matter due to it being self organizing, either on its own or as part of a larger system.
Thanks for the link. You are a little difficult to follow once you get going, but on the whole I was quite impressed. We agree on a systems / embodied approach. I would disagree on pantheism, but I think @Gnomon would agree with you.
Quoting simeonz
This is something I have thought about myself, I wonder if emotion is an emergent property or something that exists for all the layers of a complex multilayered biological system in some form. But this would be off topic.
Quoting simeonz
I'm not sure I do either. I try to, but mostly I'm late to the party. :smile: That consciousness = self organization is consistent with complexity theory. I probably should qualify every comment with - " in my understanding". I tend to assume comments made here are propositional, and will be scrutinized.
Quoting simeonz
It is now generally recognized that in many important fields of research a state of true thermodynamic equilibrium is only attained in exceptional conditions. Experiments with radioactive tracers, for example, have shown that the nucleic acids contained in living cells continuously exchange matter with their surroundings. It is also well known that the steady flow of energy which originates in the sun and the stars prevents the atmosphere of the earth or stars from reaching a state of thermodynamic equilibrium.Obviously then, the majority of the phenomena studied in biology, meteorology, astrophysics and other subjects are irreversible processes which take place outside the equilibrium state.These few examples may serve to illustrate the urgent need for an extension of the methods of thermodynamics so as to include irreversible processes.
I can see how entropy might play a role in cellular evolution in closed systems - driving more complex molecular configurations. But natural systems are open. The overwhelming impression is that they self organize despite all the obstacles they face, including entropy.
Quoting Gary Enfield
Can you provide a link or summary please?
Your interacting waves of energy are similar to Turing patterns.
In a broad sense, I am OK with the general notion of Pantheism, but for my particular worldview, I call it PanEnDeism. :cool:
PanEnDeism :
Panendeism is an ontological position that explores the interrelationship between God (The Cosmic Mind) and the known attributes of the universe. Combining aspects of Panentheism and Deism, Panendeism proposes an idea of God that both embodies the universe and is transcendent of its observable physical properties.
https://panendeism.org/faq-and-questions/
Note -- PED is distinguished from general Deism, by its more specific notion of the G*D/Creation relationship; and from PanDeism by its understanding of G*D as supernatural creator rather than the emergent soul of Nature. Enformationism is a Panendeistic worldview.
http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page16.html
Note 2. -- Panendeism is not equivalent to the bible-god, but is an alternative to the eternal/external Multiverse theory, in which our space-time bound world is a small part of the infinite whole.
:up: Thanks for that.
Quoting Pop
My pleasure - here's two:-
https://www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech/evidence-emerges-of-brand-new-force-of-nature-at-cern-1.5360051
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/mar/23/large-hadron-collider-scientists-particle-physics
A lot of experimental results that seem to break the Laws of Physics, can either be explained by ridiculous notions that desperately try to preserve scientific doctrine over common sense, or we can accept simpler and more obvious possibilities - that other factors (forces and, by implication, other types of stuff), might exist.
The CERN findings are perhaps the first scientifically undeniable proof that other factors do exist.... which may ultimately, in turn, lead to potential explanations for consciousness etc.
When new fundamental aspects of nature are uncovered we need to investigate the properties of those things - which will inevitably open up new potential, without having to junk our hard-won understanding of Matter/Energy, as it is proven to work in the totality of our experiences.
At least, for myself, it strengthens the view that matter is a state of integrated energy and information, and this is what consciousness also is - a state of integrated energy and information embedded in matter.
There is clearly information and logic within the totality of existence, as we all know that we use this as part of our conscious lives. That doesn't necessarily mean that there has always been information as a base part of existence, rather than it being an emergent property from our consciousness.
To my mind, the results from CERN do not demonstrate any base level information layer. Indeed, much of scientific research seems to be aimed at finding physical/particulate answers to everything.
You may be right - that in some way, information may be an ever-present factor. But that hasn't been demonstrated as far as I know. If you believe that such evidence exists then it may well be worth a separate thread.
I still believe that the current scientific explanations for existence as a whole must be missing one or more factors, because they simply don't explain everything we observe. That is why I was interested by the finding from CERN (above).
I suppose that in the case of the origin of life, as mentioned across many previous comments on this thread, there are certain key unexplained features, and I have been trying to determine what physical characteristics might be required to resolve them if the gap is truly physical rather than information/will of God.
The use of codes within the replication mechanism is a particularly interesting aspect of this.
If you wish to build up an argument for an information layer, can I suggest that you assemble such factors that might require it, and put them into your model so that we can all appreciate how the logic / explanation might work?