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WBraun
climber
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Mar 31, 2012 - 11:30am PT
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healyje -- "No god required - never was, never will be."
That's an absolute and unknown ultimately to material mechanistic science.
That so called Modern science that you subscribe to doesn't deal in absolutes.
You are the big worshiper of that so called science.
Thus you are a hypocrite of the highest order and a totally unscientific fool .....
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Klimmer
Mountain climber
San Diego
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Mar 31, 2012 - 11:47am PT
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^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
WB,
Word.
Mar 30, 2012 - 07:57pm PT
Organics Probably Formed Easily in Early Solar System
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"Whenever you make a new planetary system, these kinds of things should go on," said Scott Sandford, a space science researcher at NASA Ames. "This potential to make organics and then dump them on the surfaces of any planet you make is probably a universal process."
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/03/120330205815.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily+%28ScienceDaily%3A+Latest+Science+News%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher
Yes, even the oldest meteorites we find that predate our Solar system (Carbonacious Chondrites) are loaded with organic molecules, some even have a special aroma as a result of so many organics.
But organic molecules are building blocks only. You have no structure. You have no life.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis
Abiogenesis can not explain non-living matter ----> to life (yet). Personally, I don't think they ever will, because it takes GOD to do so. Once, life begins, then yes the mechanics of evolution can occur and take place.
If I come and dump a truck-load of bricks onto your front lawn, it does not make the Sistine Chapel. That takes designers and skilled laborers to do so.
Equivalently, a large amount of organic molecules do not make the simplest microbial organism, the first life form, in whatever form it took. It would seem to suggest that it takes a designer. We call him GOD. And he did it through Theistic Evolution.
"And in him was the breath of Life."
John.1:1-5 (KJV)
[1] In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
[2] The same was in the beginning with God.
[3] All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.
[4] In him was life; and the life was the light of men.
[5] And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.
Edit:
By the way, the above is "Forbidden Secret Knowledge" and is not allowed to be taught or learned in public education.
I'm OK with that. Sometimes we learn and come to the truth outside the State sanctioned system of education.
So be it.
As Sting sings in Wrapped Around Your Finger
http://www.songfacts.com/detail.php?id=1683
"I have only come here seeking knowledge,
Things they would not teach me of in college."
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Mar 31, 2012 - 12:35pm PT
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Klimmer, which of the various religions would you teach "secret knowledge" from?
which is correct?
you and go-B seem to have a christian bent...
Werner has studied ancient South Asian teachings
others here have stated many different ideas...
As with many of these discussions, the domain of those teachings becomes smaller and smaller as our scientific sophistication increasingly provides understanding of many of the "mysteries" of antiquity.
There is no reason why life, itself, cannot be explained by this scientific reasoning... and whatever the case, science will continue to study and explain this stuff, all of it, to varying degrees of success.
While we all have opinions on the potential success of this course of study, they are just opinions, the work will be done and we'll know, someday... the science is not static, is not fixed, but ever refined.
This is in counter-distinction to some rather old thinking, some of it quite good, but most of it fixed into dogma, revealed to us as "secret knowledge" the source of which is not any more than the source of scientific inspiration and work, which is to say, ourselves. People thought through this stuff long ago, codified it and passed it along... some of them thought that they experienced supernatural inspiration, all they know is that they had some experience, some thought, that was beyond their experience... and interpreted that experience in the context of their times.
Science, as you know, proceeds from a very different starting point, and claims a limited domain of explanation, that of the physical world alone.... yet even staying in that domain it has been able to explain a vast phenomenology, not just as a set of facts, but as understanding of how these phenomena arise, and how they are related. And the knowledge is not "revealed" but taught as a logical system accessible to all.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Mar 31, 2012 - 03:17pm PT
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. . . revealed to us as "secret knowledge" the source of which is not any more than the source of scientific inspiration and work, which is to say, ourselves.
--
There are more than a few people who would argue that ALL which enters consciousness is not sourced, or created, entirely, by ourselves, starting with the agency of awareness itself. And I don't mean to nitpick or repeat old arguments and spin on the head of a pin. I just question the belief that the evolved brain "creates," in the classical fashion, the entire consciousness process, just as I reject the idea that "God" does what the brain cannot, or is not doing.
Just today, in the LA Times, big brain guru Jonah Lehrer was asked if there was a Holy Grail in neuroscience and he said:
"Consciousness. These trillion synaptic connections, somehow they give rise to subjective self-experience. We have no idea how that happens, not even a glimmer."
And yet note how he clings to the belief that synaptics connections "give rise" (create) experience. I'm not saying they don't, in some partisan way, only that perhaps there are other factors involved which are being missed through clinging to the old "transmission" model of consciousness.
"Not even a glimmer" is quite a different thing than saying, "we just need a little more of the same data, but better."
It sure is interesting to see where this is going, and to revise my ideas as things unfold. I think most any dogmatic approach, either in quantifying or whatever, will prove one-dimensional soon enough.
JL
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Hannes
Ice climber
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Mar 31, 2012 - 07:32pm PT
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Not being American I can't quite understand how this thread can exist in the 21st century, or 20th even. Maybe there is a God, who knows? But now Christianity isn't the best explanation of how life came about and has come to where it is now. Please don't come with quotes from a book that was written hundreds of years after the main events. Do people not want their children to have the best possible education? We don't teach kids that phlogiston is the reason for fires because we have found a better explanation.
Evolution is a science and should be treated as such. Also bear in mind that abiogenesis is not evolution. Right now God is maybe the best explanation to abiogenesis but I doubt it'll remain as such as science progresses. Since the dawn of man God has filled that ever smaller hole of unexplained phenomena from lightning to why we get ill and one day I suspect he will be pushed out of the equation completely. I wonder what the bible would have said if it was written today with what we know now.
As for the basic building blocks of life, they are really rather uncomplicated and far from impossible that it happened without divine intervention.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Mar 31, 2012 - 07:56pm PT
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Brain guru Jonah Lehrer: "Consciousness. These trillion synaptic connections, somehow they give rise to subjective self-experience. We have no idea how that happens, not even a glimmer."
Largo: And yet note how he clings to the belief that synaptics connections "give rise" (create) experience. I'm not saying they don't, in some partisan way, only that perhaps there are other factors involved which are being missed through clinging to the old "transmission" model of consciousness.
It's a pretty simple proposition: we know more or less what we know, we have a rough idea of what we don't know, and conjecture around what we don't know is cool. What isn't cool is just making various and sundry voodoo bullshit up to fill the void about what we don't know.
For me it seems you have what borders on a profound problem with the fact we simply don't know some things and that our 'knowing' is still a long, long way off and maybe somethings are simply too complex to parse out all the way. What exactly is the problem with "not even a glimmer"? So what? Hey, it's where we are. But again, I don't see how our current ignorance shouldn't be taken as some sort of license to proffer all manner of ludicrous wankery in in its place.
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ms55401
Trad climber
minneapolis, mn
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Mar 31, 2012 - 08:04pm PT
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why is this stupid-as-fukk thread here?
not trying to be an as#@&%e
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Mar 31, 2012 - 08:59pm PT
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But again, I don't see how our current ignorance shouldn't be taken as some sort of license to proffer all manner of ludicrous wankery in in its place.
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You either don't know how to read "the English," or you need to up your meds, you silly punter, for at no place have I "proffered" ANY voovuuu ideas per the origins of consciousness - unless you're yet another who worships quantification, and any questions about there being limitations of this mode are, in your view, proof of "wankery" and snake oil. Such a view is scientism, and you can have it.
But soberly, for a moment, look at Lehrer's exact language. "Not even a glimmer" is not, "We have some reasonable idea," or, "We're confident that we're on the right track, and are using the right approach," and especially not, "The processing, objective functioning models people are studying are drawing closer to understanding how consciousness itself works and how it arises from matter." He's saying exactly the opposite of this. Clearly.
If we were on a climb, "Not a glimmer," by it's common usuage, would mean to me that there was basically no chance, for instance, that I am going to climb this next pitch. "A tiny glimmer," or "a faint glimmer" - then maybe I keep throwing myself at the very same line. But if after all this work there's "not a glimmer," at all, whatsoever, I wouldn't necessarily abandon the route then and there, but damn straight I'd start looking for other lines. If in your view, suggesting that we look for alternative lines is in itself "proffering all manner of ludicrous wankery," I figure you must be another of those jugheads who views ALL alternatives to measuring - including those yet conceived - as belly flops into the Blood of Christ and creationism.
That rather amazes me.
JL
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Mar 31, 2012 - 09:23pm PT
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Largo: But soberly, for a moment, look at Lehrer's exact language. "Not even a glimmer" is not, "We have some reasonable idea," or, "We're confident that we're on the right track, and are using the right approach," and especially not, "The processing, objective functioning models people are studying are drawing closer to understanding how consciousness itself works and how it arises from matter." He's saying exactly the opposite of this. Clearly.
The level of inference and extrapolation in this statement is somewhat, though unsurprisingly, hyperbolic. Dude, take it a face value - we don't have any idea and let it go at that - he neither implies nor infers any of your superfluous extrapolations.
Largo: If we were on a climb, "Not a glimmer," by it's common usuage, would mean to me that there was basically no chance, for instance, that I am going to climb this next pitch. "A tiny glimmer," or "a faint glimmer" - then maybe I keep throwing myself at the very same line. But if after all this work there's "not a glimmer," at all, whatsoever, I wouldn't necessarily abandon the route then and there, but damn straight I'd start looking for other lines.
It's a wonder you put up an FA at all if that was your attitude and approach at the time. 'Not a glimmer, "by its common meaning" [in climbing] means I haven't the slightest clue where I'm going, and maybe not even where I am, but it has only rarely ever meant I'm backing off or walking away. On the contrary, my experience has been sometimes you just have to work through that sh#t.
Largo: If in your view, suggesting that we look for alternative lines is in itself "proffering all manner of ludicrous wankery," I figure you must be another of those jugheads who views ALL alternatives to measuring - including those yet conceived - as belly flops into the Blood of Christ and creationism.
I'm suggesting we've barely gotten both feet off the starting line to understanding the brain or mind because we've only had the tooling to begin such research in a productive manner for such a short period of time we're still just trying to get a basic understanding of how brain fundamentals work - and that's just from the genetic, chemical, electro-chemical, neuro-anatomy, and functional organization perspectives alone. You might also consider this as a 'grand challenge' of human endeavors and you and others should scale your perceptions of "all this work" way, way back down because we've barely scratched the surface to-date.
I'm also suggesting I view alternatives that are endlessly obfusticated with metaphysical gobbledygook, are utterly resilient to plain language, or can't be experienced by the average human as "ludicrous wankery."
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Easy, boys, I have repeatedly said that science has every right to push on trying to measure it's way to understanding consciousness. Lehrer is clearly going that route. My point was that a stringent, bottom-up causal model, or a model based on processing or the objective functioning of "things," might not be the route to take here. This I can see is considered heretical.
Where Healyje looses his way, IMO, is in flubbing the metaphor. When I dragged a climbing into this, I was suggesting that "not a glimmer" in Lehrer's case meant that he thought or was certain he knew the way (measuring, and that consciousness arose, in whole, from the brain), or the "route." Problem is, the skill, or as Healyje would put it, the rack or the gear, is insufficient as yet for the given climb - but once we get the gadgets. we'll send straight off. Right.
In fact we don't know the route at all, and that's why there is "not a glimmer," namely, because as I've said till I was blue in the face, consciousness and experience are not "things," and so to approach them as things will always yeild massive data per objective functioning, but "not a glimmer" about consciousness. Try and we will, they are not the selfsame things.
My broken-record commentary here about non-things has never found much traction, and has been called rubbish, wankery, and so on. But this idea is thousands of years old, and even of scientists of some merit, like Werner Heisenberg, have broached the subject:
“The ontology of materialism rested upon the illusion that the kind of existence, the direct ‘actuality’ of the world around us, can be extrapolated into the atomic range. This extrapolation, however, is impossible . .. atoms are not things.”
You can treat atoms like things and gain remarkable insights about functioning and processing, but consciousness itself is a different matter completely, ergo "not a glimmer."
When something is greater than it's individual parts, a top down dynamic is always at play, IME.
JL
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Apr 20, 2012 - 11:42pm PT
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a cross post...
...up above I used for the definition of life:
"(i) to couple energy from the environment into usable chemical forms;
(ii) to carry out specific catalytic functions;
(iii) to make and/or copy macromolecules;
(iv) to give some of these informational significance."
the published results seems to check items (ii), (iii) and (iv)
on another post there were these definitions of life:
“Life is self-reproduction with variations”.
“Any system capable of replication and mutation is alive”.
which is satisfied by the systems in these experiments...
Science:
Toward an Alternative Biology Science 336, 307 (2012);
Gerald F. Joyce
Genetics provides a mechanism for molecular memory and thus the basis for Darwinian evolution. It involves the storage and propagation of molecular information and the refi nement of that information through experience and differential survival. Heretofore, the only molecules known to be capable of undergoing Darwinian evolution were RNA and DNA, the genetic molecules of biology. But on page 341 of this issue, Pinheiro et al. ( 1) expand the palette considerably. They report six alternative genetic polymers that can be used to store and propagate information; one of these was made to undergo Darwinian evolution in response to imposed selection constraints. The work heralds the era of synthetic genetics, with implications for exobiology, biotechnology, and understanding of life itself.
Science 336, 341 (2012);
Synthetic Genetic Polymers Capable of Heredity and Evolution
Vitor B. Pinheiro, Alexander I. Taylor, Christopher Cozens, Mikhail Abramov, Marleen Renders, Su Zhang, John C. Chaput, Jesper Wengel, Sew-Yeu Peak-Chew, Stephen H. McLaughlin, Piet Herdewijn, Philipp Holliger
Genetic information storage and processing rely on just two polymers, DNA and RNA, yet whether their role reflects evolutionary history or fundamental functional constraints is currently unknown. With the use of polymerase evolution and design, we show that genetic information can be stored in and recovered from six alternative genetic polymers based on simple nucleic acid architectures not found in nature [xeno-nucleic acids (XNAs)]. We also select XNA aptamers, which bind their targets with high affinity and specificity, demonstrating that beyond heredity, specific XNAs have the capacity for Darwinian evolution and folding into defined structures. Thus, heredity and evolution, two hallmarks of life, are not limited to DNA and RNA but are likely to be emergent properties of polymers capable of information storage.
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go-B
climber
Habakkuk 3:19 Sozo
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Apr 21, 2012 - 08:17am PT
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Proverbs 20:12 The hearing ear and the seeing eye,
The Lord has made them both.
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Norwegian
Trad climber
Placerville, California
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Apr 21, 2012 - 08:31am PT
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just ass my dog makes her morning turd on dry leaves,
gobi must drop his morning brain stool on our grounds.
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MH2
climber
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Apr 21, 2012 - 10:45am PT
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When something is greater than it's individual parts, a top down dynamic is always at play, IME.
Is that how you would look at a beehive or ant colony?
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Apr 21, 2012 - 11:40am PT
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When something is greater than it's individual parts, a top down dynamic is always at play, IME.
Is that how you would look at a beehive or ant colony?
------
What, in your opinion, is the qualitative difference between a beehive, an ant farm, and self-consciousness? Not the mechanism you believe "produces" consciousness, but the consciousness you directly experience as you are reading this. If you can't tell the difference, the conversation stops right here - of that we may be sure.
Another question is: Give us an example of something with an "emergent" function or aspect that you consider to be greater than the parts you believe product it.
I'm waiting for my ride out to Joshua Tree so I'l add this - which is the root of the whole thing:
The question arises: Can we explain consciousness in mechanistic
ological explanations of consciousness, in contrast to terms? Science generally assumes the sufficiency and necessity of mechanistic explanations, thus avoiding dualism. By mechanistic explanation, it is meant any concrete physical process that can be realized computationally, ranging from chaotic dynamics (Freeman, , Heidegger) and ‘Darwinian’ competition (Edelman, Dreyfus & Dreyfus, Berry & Broadbent), to quantum mechanics (Penrose).
Jackendoff suggested this thesis: ‘‘Every phenomenological distinction is caused by /supported by /projected from a computational distinction.’’ In other words, the belief runs, any so-called “emergent” function such as mind or consciusness is strictly the mechanical outcome of a computational i.e., mechanical process.
Sounds good - till you look closer.
The fly in the oinment, or the turd in the punchbowl, as it were, is that there is no explanation why any mechanical process (whether it is in the form of attractors, reverberation, synchronous firing, coherence, et al) leads to consciousness; that is, what is monumental qualitatively difference of one mechanical or computational process from another that can account for the qualitative, phenomenological difference in consciousness?
Basically, what this whole angle rests upon is the religious belief that without mechanistic explanations, we can never claim to have achieved a true understanding of the nature of consciousness. This assumes that at it's most basic level, consciousness is thing, a mechanism.
And that brings to light another question: What in reality is NOT a mechanism?
JL
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MH2
climber
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Apr 21, 2012 - 09:46pm PT
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What, in your opinion, is the qualitative difference between a beehive, an ant farm, and self-consciousness?
I don't have an opinion on or answer to that question.
Another question is: Give us an example of something with an "emergent" function or aspect that you consider to be greater than the parts you believe product it.
A beehive. An ant colony.
Basically, what this whole angle rests upon is the religious belief that without mechanistic explanations, we can never claim to have achieved a true understanding of the nature of consciousness. This assumes that at it's most basic level, consciousness is thing, a mechanism.
A sense that "a top-down dynamic is at play" sounds much more like religious belief. I think you are pulled toward the spiritual and mystical, JL.
Neurophysiologist Eric Luschei once told me he thought all neurobiologists were on a journey, either downwards toward the molecule or upwards towards the soul.
One can also see it as a jig-saw puzzle. You have to look carefully at what is already known before you can ask a good question, get the answer, and connect a new piece where it belongs among the rest.
I don't know that it helps to talk about the "most basic level" of consciousness. You need to know certain things to understand the motions of galaxies, very different things to understand chemical reactions. Is one area "more basic" than the other? By "most basic level" do you mean molecules? Atoms? Sub-atomic particles?
The real question is: What can you learn beyond what you already know?
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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Apr 22, 2012 - 02:54pm PT
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Theoretical talk about the brain is one thing but undergraduate students at least seem more impressed with what we know of comparative behavior among the great apes, including us.
One of the best sources for teaching and gifts for young friends is the gorilla foundation which has videos and books of sign language using gorillas. They've also begun to study the brain of one of the signing gorillas who died. His brain has more neurons of a certain type than found in any other nonhuman primate studied to date – a number close to that appearing in humans.
A $25 donation and you will receive their newsletter.
http://www.koko.org/index.php
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MH2
climber
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Apr 22, 2012 - 03:09pm PT
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Behavior is the brain's output. Behavior is a worthwhile study in its own right.
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go-B
climber
Habakkuk 3:19 Sozo
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Apr 22, 2012 - 04:48pm PT
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1 Chronicles 29:11 Yours, O Lord, is the greatness,
The power and the glory,
The victory and the majesty;
For all that is in heaven and in earth is Yours;
Yours is the kingdom, O Lord,
And You are exalted as head over all.
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