Discussion Topic |
|
This thread has been locked |
Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
|
|
|
Feb 20, 2012 - 04:37pm PT
|
Wiley, you've lost your way. Name one place where I have offered any interpretation of evolution. I had to read ALL of de Chardin's stuff in grad school, and about every other evolutionist since so I can appreciate the incredible time needed for things to gestate.
I'm simply pointing out the irony of insisting that true knowledge must be based on physical observations, and the fact that we cannot observe matter becoming life or matter becoming conscious in the feral and natural world.
Craig insists that "creating" living membranes is easy. Then we should easily be able to see and document the moment that the inorganic becomes organic.
I think what Riley is suggesting is that it takes incredible amounts of time for complex organisms to arise from simple enzimes and proteins and so forth. But somewhere, at the most fundamental stage, the inorganic MUST become the organic or the causal claim of materialists breaks down since matter cannot be demonstrated to "create" life.
My sense of this is that there are a billion intermediate stages between a rock, say, and Craig's brainpan. And that the rock did not through natural selection and a gazillion years, "create Craig's bean, that his brain, and every intermediate step, is in some way embedded or is a native property of everything else. Boehm's implicate order was a flop in the end but it may turn out that quantifying and differentiating are themselves merely derivititive aspects of that illusive "one thing."
I've always though that at the bottom, these discussions are really about causation. And when the borders blur, that subject becomes very odd and interesting.
JL
|
|
WBraun
climber
|
|
|
Feb 20, 2012 - 04:44pm PT
|
Dr F -- "The membrane science is the easiest part of making new life."
You haven't even made any life yet.
It should be worded trying to make new life.
As usual making up sh!t again.
Terrible scientist ....
|
|
Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
|
|
|
Feb 20, 2012 - 04:44pm PT
|
Largo
How did you come into being?
How do you explain sexual reproduction and the mechanisms behind?
Non-physical?
|
|
Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
|
|
|
Feb 20, 2012 - 05:05pm PT
|
Dr.F
As long as a human being has still not been built bottom up in a laboratory, the thought of doing so is still a vision, still speculative thinking, and not science.
When it comes to Largo's usual two-point rap we agree.
|
|
Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
|
|
|
Feb 20, 2012 - 05:14pm PT
|
Dr.F
In my view science is about what is and not about what will probably be. Even though the visions and thoughts about what will be within a scientific community have a very much higher probability of becoming reality than strange religious speculations about a returning God or aliens arriving by UFO.
|
|
Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
|
|
|
Feb 20, 2012 - 05:19pm PT
|
Largo's massive stubbornness and unwillingness to give up on God's Magic
Where have you ever seen me mention "God's magic?" Or use the word God in relation to evolution. Use that rock on your shoulders.
You guys keep yammering about Frank "making" life in the lab - "from scratch." Fine. Where? Show us. And I'm stubborn and doing a two-step for asking the question.
Or asking how matter becomes conscious, and pointing out the spectacular qualititative difference between objective functioning and sentience. I never dragged God into this. Seems crowded enough as is.
Many, those are the most basic questions of them all.
JL
|
|
WBraun
climber
|
|
|
Feb 20, 2012 - 05:23pm PT
|
Largo -- "Or use the word God in relation to evolution."
That's Dr F making up sh!t again as usual .....
Terrible scientist.
|
|
Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
|
|
|
Feb 20, 2012 - 05:25pm PT
|
There you go Largo, there you go... and choirboy WBraun... ;o)
|
|
Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
|
|
|
Feb 20, 2012 - 05:28pm PT
|
after a long discussion with Largo on the What is "Mind"? thread and now having the issues of "causality" pop up here in a discussion of "what is life" and re-reading Schrödinger, it is interesting to re-cast the question and propose a view point (though not an answer).
I am not sure what Largo means by "causality" exactly... what he has in mind is a connection of events each inducing the next. His main point is that this cannot explain life (or mind).
Depending on what he takes as the "causative" agent starts to make sense of his argument. If we take that causative to be some dynamical law of nature, "dynamical" meaning the "motion" due to some "force" (think F=ma) we can demonstrate that Largo is correct in his assertion. For all these dynamical forces so reduced to their elemental events are reversible, that is, they occur going forward in time and the whole causal chain, based on such interactions, works backward in time too.
This is counter to our experience that life, among many other things, are irreversible.
Schrödinger writes: "I remember an interesting little paper by Max Planck on the topic 'The Dynamical and Statistical Type of Law' ('Dynamische und Statistische Gesetzmässigkeit'). The distinction being precisely the one we have here labeeled as 'order from order' and 'order from disorder'. The object of that paper was to show how the interesting statistical type law, controlling large-scale events, is constituted from the 'dynamical' laws supposed to govern the small-scale events, the interaction of single atoms and molecules. The later type is illustrated by the large-scale mechanical phenomena, as the motion of the planets or of a clock, etc."
Schrödinger takes this in another direction and doesn't expand on Planck's ideas, but statistical laws are not reversible... and they would be the type we might be interested in studying irreversible phenomena, such as life.
In particular, the concept of causality in Largo's invocation of it vanishes, but the fact that the system exhibiting this behavior is purely "mechanistic." While the ideas are technically difficult to deal with, they are a part of physics, established since the middle of the 19th century. Statistical mechanics, at finite temperature, is not something that has entered the popular domain, however, and the ideas are foreign to non-technical readers, even the most basic ideas.
Unfortunately (and surprisingly) there is no Wikipedia page to link to, but if you read
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_mechanics
The basic issues are hinted at in the article on "non-equilibrium thermodynamics"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-equilibrium_thermodynamics
where the definition of entropy in a non-equilibrium system problematic. While "entropy" is a definable quantity in equilibrium, its definition sets the course of the statistical mechanics you derive... and Planck points out another definition that ends up with a different statistical mechanics... (coarsely speaking).
In all these systems, the concept of event-by-event causal chains are completely given up. The "causality" of the underlying dynamics is not necessary in the description of the physical systems, and no need is found to resort to some additional "property" of the systems in order to explain the behavior.
Largo's proposal is that matter has some fundamental property related to the attribute of "life" or "mind," due to the lack of ability to show a mechanistic causal relationship that, taking a bag of cells, creates "mind" or a bag of amino acids creates "life." He has not explored alternative explanations of phenomena based on these "non-equilibrium" or "finite temperature" or "statistical law" ideas which are still very much in development in physics.
|
|
cowpoke
climber
|
|
|
Feb 20, 2012 - 05:39pm PT
|
sorry to interrupt discussions of causality and mind, but some more resources for teaching evolution
a nice interactive report from NSF: http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/darwin/
and the 15 evolutionary gems from Nature: http://www.nature.com/nature/newspdf/evolutiongems.pdf which provides...
a succinct briefing on why evolution by natural selection is an empirically validated principle is useful for people
to have to hand. We offer here 15 examples published by Nature over the past decade or so to illustrate the breadth, depth and power of evolutionary thinking.
also, thought the following statement (link below) from the National Academies (National Academy of Science, National Academy of Engineering, Institute of Medicine, and National Research Council) might interest some...
Compatibility of Science and Religion
Science is not the only way of knowing and understanding. But science is a way of knowing that differs from other ways in its dependence on empirical evidence and testable explanations. Because biological evolution accounts for events that are also central concerns of religion — including the origins of biological diversity and especially the origins of humans — evolution has been a contentious idea within society since it was first articulated by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace in 1858.
Acceptance of the evidence for evolution can be compatible with religious faith. Today, many religious denominations accept that biological evolution has produced the diversity of living things over billions of years of Earth’s history. Many have issued statements observing that evolution and the tenets of their faiths are compatible. Scientists and theologians have written eloquently about their awe and wonder at the history of the universe and of life on this planet, explaining that they see no conflict between their faith in God and the evidence for evolution. Religious denominations that do not accept the occurrence of evolution tend to be those that believe in strictly literal interpretations of religious texts.
Science and religion are based on different aspects of human experience. In science, explanations must be based on evidence drawn from examining the natural world. Scientifically based observations or experiments that conflict with an explanation eventually must lead to modification or even abandonment of that explanation. Religious faith, in contrast, does not depend only on empirical evidence, is not necessarily modified in the face of conflicting evidence, and typically involves supernatural forces or entities. Because they are not a part of nature, supernatural entities cannot be investigated by science. In this sense, science and religion are separate and address aspects of human understanding in different ways. Attempts to pit science and religion against each other create controversy where none needs to exist.
http://nationalacademies.org/evolution/Compatibility.html
|
|
Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
|
|
|
Feb 20, 2012 - 05:42pm PT
|
I think Largo is responding to the question of the OP author "what is life?"
a question different from evolution, but obviously relevant.
|
|
WBraun
climber
|
|
|
Feb 20, 2012 - 05:55pm PT
|
Science is asking questions that haven't been answered, then studying them and coming up with an answer.
Science is observation and experiment.
The answer to how life was created has already been answered, It happened naturally on earth from a chemical process.
That's not the answer. It's still a hypothesis and theory.
|
|
Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
|
|
|
Feb 20, 2012 - 06:46pm PT
|
Dr.F
If I with science didn't only think of scientific method and the disclosure of what is within the physical and psychological world, but also added technology and the development of technology, I think we could possibly agree. Though I have a problem with your absolute certainity.
If I think of science as scientific method and the disclosure of what is I get a problem seeing as scientific that a human being will with absolute certainity be created bottom up in the laboratory in the future. I would see that as a technological vision.
|
|
Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
|
|
|
Feb 20, 2012 - 07:04pm PT
|
Largo, Its either or
No, it's not. That's the problem with our thinking IMO. There are a million shades of gray that we live in always. Where, for instance, does matter become conscious? At what stage? According to what criteria? When does this or that bag of protein become biological?
Ed said:
Largo's proposal is that matter has some fundamental property related to the attribute of "life" or "mind," due to the lack of ability to show a mechanistic causal relationship that, taking a bag of cells, creates "mind" or a bag of amino acids creates "life."
I think most biologists will say that RNA and DNA is the fundamental property or inherent propulsion or vector that organizes life, and that without the coding, matter would have no organizing propulsion. The idea that Nature simply "does this on its own," or organizes into life by accident, sans DNA or any other contributing factor, or keeps expanding and morphing and driving toward complexity is quite another issue than natural selection skimming off the cream by virtue of it's superior functioning, a process by which randomness dumps a near infinite variety of shite into the ballgame, so to speak, and that which catches and throws best, survives. Now did the fundamental components of the bucolic shite "create" the survivor, or the "power set," or did the environment evoke it by way of killing off all the other players? Are they the same?
Going on:
He has not explored alternative explanations of phenomena based on these "non-equilibrium" or "finite temperature" or "statistical law" ideas which are still very much in development in physics.
Aren't these more mechanistic models with a dash of randomness/chaos tossed in for garnish? Doesn't this stuff relate back to Pascal and the others?
JL
|
|
Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
|
|
|
Feb 20, 2012 - 08:04pm PT
|
not Pascal, but understanding the behavior of a system of a huge number of smaller parts interacts together...
some of this we understand if the conditions are correct, e.g. "thermodynamic equilibrium" but we are still learning how to deal with systems of particles that are in non-equilibrium conditions.
The laws governing these systems may not be reducible to a simple set of underlying dynamical laws, which is what Planck was exploring in his paper. Schrödinger goes on to ask "What is the characteristic feature of life? When is a piece of matter said to be alive?" and he answers it along the lines of his very brief discussion: " When it goes on 'doing something', moving, exchanging material with its environment, and so forth, and that for a much longer period than we would expect an inanimate piece of matter to 'keep going' under similar circumstances."
This launches him into a discussion of entropy and of what the expectations of "inanimate" object behaviors as distinguished from animate object behaviors.
"Every process, event, happening - call it what you will; in a word, everything that is going on in Nature means an increase of the entropy of the part of the world where it is going on. Thus a living organism continually increases its entropy - and thus tends to approach the dangerous state of maximum entropy, which is death. It can only keep aloof from it, i.e. alive, by continually drawing from the environment negative entropy... the essential thing in metabolism is that the organism succeeds in freeing itself from all the entropy it cannot help to producing while alive."
This is problematic since it is possible that we cannot define entropy for a living system as we do so successfully for other, simpler systems.
However it is the set of chemical reactions which change the local entropy, decreasing the bits of the reaction's entropy while increasing the surrounding entropy which is at work here... what must happen for this to be possible is susceptible to scientific investigation... and is being investigated both experimentally and theoretically.
This will definitely require us to understand these complex systems much better than we do now, so yes, it will take new physics to understand life.
|
|
Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
|
|
|
Feb 20, 2012 - 08:11pm PT
|
ok, here is a paper that treats the question "what is life?" in a comprehensive survey of definitions
http://www.jbsdonline.com/mc_images/category/4313/4-trifonov_jbsd_29_2.pdf
an interesting read...
how about:
“Life is self-reproduction with variations”.
“Any system capable of replication and mutation is alive”.
Along these lines Darwin wrote:
“… if variations useful to any organic being ever do occur, assuredly individuals thus characterized will have the best chance of being preserved in the struggle for life; and from the strong principle of inheritance, these will tend to produce offspring similarly characterized”
|
|
healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
|
|
|
Feb 20, 2012 - 09:40pm PT
|
Ah, this certainly explains a lot on the mind thread. It's pretty clear some folks simply don't and will never accept:
a) the notion their life and mind are the result of completely random processes
and
b) that there aren't supernatural explanations for whatever science can't definitively answer right now, today.
|
|
Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
|
|
|
Feb 20, 2012 - 11:20pm PT
|
I have to wonder if the tendency is to get ahead of the game even at the beginning.
Craig talks about "once life got started, it was driven entirely by evolution." But that's a big "once." Such as, when was that "once" and what was involved?
Next quote: "It's an ever replicating code for proteins that divides and makes mistakes and divides and makes mistakes. Every once in a while that code creates some trait, physiological function, or anatomical function that adds to the complexity of life. It's utterly random and selected by the environment at that time. And the proof of it is everywhere and in everything.
From whence came said code, and how did it arise?
My sense of what Ed is driving at has to do with the acretion of things by way of random and chaotic subsets, above and beyond Newtonian, billiard ball causation. While seemingly undirected or predetermined from within (but what about the DNA helix) but coaxed this way of that by external factors and just plain odds, turbo charged by almost infinite cycling.
JL
|
|
Mighty Hiker
climber
Vancouver, B.C.
|
|
|
Feb 20, 2012 - 11:33pm PT
|
It's pretty clear some folks simply don't and will never accept:
a) the notion their life and mind are the result of completely random processes
Taking place over a very long period of time. I wonder if it's simply a failure of imagination, or fear of something so much larger than us?
|
|
dirtbag
climber
|
|
|
Feb 20, 2012 - 11:39pm PT
|
Evolution and You (or Why God Hated Esau)
(Obadiah) The rejection of God's revelation and the acceptance of the theory of evolution as a fact of science was the great delusion of the twentieth century. Pride is the attitude of those who declare their independence from God.
zzzzzzz...
|
|
|
SuperTopo on the Web
|
Let us know!