Compared to say the 50s, where we were in charge, in tight control of our resources, there is a lot more entropy in the system now. — MikeL

The 1950s were rich for the US because oil could be extracted and delivered with an EROEI (energy returned on energy invested) of 100 to 1. The fuel creating the economy was basically free. Nowadays the ratio is down to 10 to 1. So no boom for average America.

So yes. Owning the resources is key. But there was more entropy going spare back then - as can be told by the gas guzzler 1950s cars.

There is more to modern economics than just having cheap fossil fuel to burn. But also, the correlations with GDP say it is the dominant factor. Hence fracking and its short lived sugar rush that let the US stagger on without real reform post GFC.

Academic education is all about regurgitating for A's. — Rich

Sure, at school, there often is too much stress on regurgitation at the expense of teaching critical thinking.

But the question here, on a philosophy forum, is are you able to demonstrate a capacity for critical thinking?

You have your own faith to peddle. Morphogenetic fields, holographic quantum mind projection and other routine New Age babble.

What people are pointing out to you is the big difference between critical faith and uncritical faith. If you accept no method of fixing belief, then you didn't even learn that lesson at school.

What I object to is faith being shoved down people's throats. — Rich

I think you mean education.

I even objected to it in school despite the threat of not getting As. — Rich

Yep. You meant education.

For some more details on the unsoundness of your argument — fdrake

But Rich rejects logic. Rich rejects evidence. Rich rejects inductive method. Rich rejects the burden of proof. You got it, he rejects it.

I didn't view the youtube clip, but having skimmed it, I think Jacque Fresco is either misusing the term, or I'm mishearing it.

A Gaussian curve is just the bell curve of a normal probability distribution. So like the variation in people's height or IQ, you have an average and then a scattering around that average.

A powerlaw probability distribution is different in having no actual average and therefore undamped variation over every scale. That is what human wealth now looks like.

We used to be clustered around an average - back when we were all hunter/gatherers. Then we were still all fairly average when 80 per cent were peasant farmers. Now you can be anything from the $2 a day income that is about half the world to the Bill Gates earning more than a small nation.

Fresco was describing something else really. The potential for job automation rising exponentially, the number of human workers being held constant, and because of that, individual purchasing power falling to zero.

So I would forget his use of the term Gaussian. He is really talking about the same things as me. The flipside of powerlaw or scalefree economics is that just as there is no top on how wealthy an individual can grow to be, so there is the reverse consequence that the number of those on "below average" incomes increases without sensible limit. You get exactly what we see - a world of mcjobs and zero hour contracts.

Another way of talking about this powerlaw thing is "fat tail" distributions. The fat tail says you get a lot more people stuck at the bottom of the scale as the price of letting the top end soar without limit. Think of novelists or musicians. One or two make it in ridiculous fashion. The vast majority will make less than bugger all.

It's not really important to the political discussion except we should not be surprised by the fact that extreme inequality is what the unfettered free market will produce. The expectation that the distribution of wealth ought to somehow arrive at some Bell curve normal level of inequality is naive. The system is set up already to produce the most extreme possible variety of inequality - one that doesn't even have an average somewhere safely in the middle for the majority.

So actually, it is relevant to the political discussion as the unfettered free market philosophy was always going to screw the majority.

The automation of jobs debate is then a new angle here. There is no reason why we can't both automate life and then manage to spread the wealth of that through society in deliberate fashion.

But I say that more in hope than expectation. Governments have become scelerotic and weak. No one dares any radical moves as the world economy feels too precariously balanced to truly question anything.

But I guess the former outweighs the latter, right? — Wayfarer

Jeez, I gave Tour points for being upfront and honest about his metaphysical prejudices. I then pointed out the obvious flaw in his reasoning. Thousands of workable lipid options make abiogenesis more comprehensible, not less.

Deal with my actual answers, don't just divert.

And yes, any number of research patents and papers in his field of synthetic chemistry don't outweigh faulty arguments motivated by a metaphysical prejudice.

It's not lumpen materialism, but it's still materialism, insofar as the overall principle is physical, namely, entropification, which just happens to throw up apparently meaningful things, like people, in the process. — Wayfarer

It's stronger than "just happens". I said - as a metaphysical opposite or complementary thing - it would count as "meant to happen". It is another necessary fact. We can only know entropy to be a metaphysical thing because there is its metaphysical "other" from which it can measure its own existence.

Of course, if we are just speaking from a human point of view, I can agree that you are objectively right if you want to argue our entropic contribution to the Cosmos is infinitesimal, while our negentropic significance seems way out of scale.

The amount of actual entropy produced by human civilisation hardly registers in the big picture. Who cares if some random planet has a sudden temperature rise of 3 or 4 degrees?

And when it comes to negentropy, we might well be the most complex, intelligent, and creative beings ever to exist in the Universe - or at least until we went 'poof' after the short, bright flare of an anthropocene.

So yes, I am certainly a physicalist - a naturalist seeking immanent explanation with no spooky substances of any kind. And that rules out traditional notions of material substances as well as immaterial ones, as you know.

But it doesn't matter how often I remind you of such subtleties, you will still want to lump me as "other" - the necessary move to make some variety of idealism come out as right for you.

Again, I am neither idealist nor realist, materialist nor dualist.

One has the choice. Either remain trapped eternally in the standard "philosophical" culture wars - the WWE of reductionists and theists thumping chests and banging heads - or find the very small door marked exit. Walk through and discover the third option that is naturalism, organicism, systems science.

Essentially a situation where we can produce things at nearly 0 cost, and yet no one hase enough money to make the wealthy significantly wealthier. — XanderTheGrey

The statistics in operation is powerlaw, not gaussian. The current economic system is predicated on free growth with no mean restricted wealth. That is why extreme inequality - the continual move away from gaussianity - is a natural consequence. The middle class, the middle ground, has already been hollowed out by neoliberalism and globalisation.

But here is the wrinkle.

As you point out, the rise of the minimum waged and sweat shop production means that the wheels should be falling off this "economic miracle". Consumer spending ought to be evaporating, collapsing the system.

But the wealthy financialised the world economy. It gave the 99 per cent an endless line of cheap debt. That allowed the transfer of even more real world assets to the rich in exchange for wages that go now to covering interest payments.

So the poor don't just not own much right now, they are left owing more than they could ever earn in any future. While for the rich, it works the other way around.

It's actually a lot more complicated than rocket science. Rockets are simple. — Wayfarer

Yep. That was the joke.

I googled James Tour, he denies being creationist, — Wayfarer

I googled him too. His line is that he is a messianic jew who thinks it is important to read the Bible every morning and meditate on its meaning. He doesn't hear God literally speaking to him, but he is very aware of His presence.

So at least he is honest about the axe he is grinding. He has strong motivation to read the state of the science a particular way.

But I think the question still remains. The cardinal point of any living structure is that I manifests purpose, right from the very first. There has to be that purposive action for anything to be regarded as an organism, as distinct from a mineral. That intentional ability - not conscious intention, but the ability to adapt in pursuit of the goal of survival - that is unique to living forms, is it not? And that is what seems a cardinal difference from anything in the inorganic domain. — Wayfarer

Isn't that what I'm arguing? It all starts when the ontically distinct thing of information enters the world. Or rather, semiosis and "sign processing". A molecule becomes a message when it material aspects are no longer what is causal. Instead it is the function that is being executed in the name of some higher organismic purpose which is the thing.

A cell pore is just a protein switch. You can explain how it opens and shuts due to the critical instability of its mechanical arrangement of electrostatic bonds. It just wobbles back and forth for "no good reason at all" so far as any materialist can see. Indeed, a materialist would chuck such a flaky bit of machinery in the bin as being fundamentally useless.

But for a living system, that complex molecule exists to perform a function. It is informational in the sense that it performs a crisp logical operation. Shut or open. Them's your sharp choices. And so now the further thing of "choice" is an ontological reality of the world.

So the material world is already busy entropifying. It already has that global thermodynamic goal. That is how the Cosmos exists and persists. It keeps running down the hill by expanding and cooling.

Then the biological world seems to change the game by suddenly expressing a negentropic desire. It wants to live and survive. It gets this idea in its head of being an organism.

However while that is true from a particular point of view - the usual one that evolutionary theory use to tell its story from - it misses the larger point of view which is the grand thermodynamic one.

Now it can be seen that life and mind simply accelerate entropification locally. For some reason, entropification has got held up. Negentropy has arisen by accident in the form of the barriers preventing quick entropification. And so life and mind can get going as more purposeful and designed structure that knows how to fulfil the Second Law's desires.

So life's desire to exist and persist is a sub-goal - a negentropic one that subserves the global entropic one. The fact that it is the very opposite seeming kind of goal is exactly what you would expect if it is to be the complementary or mutual direction of action.

If accidental negentropy has arisen in the Cosmos - like the way fossilised plankton got trapped as petroleum in ancient sedimentary rock - then what could be more fitting than purposeful negentropy arising as the matching response. Entropification which got locally deaccelerated can be locally reaccelerated again.

Indeed, just as we humans are doing for those languishing fossil fuel stores in our valiant bid to waste them all to heat in great big planetary-scale burst.

Of course you will protest again that life on earth can't be so pointless and futile as all that. You feel that being human must have some special significance.

But my argument allows humans to invent their own meanings if they like - so long as they are intelligent enough to understand the constraints that have formed their nature so far.

Thermodynamics only sets the ground conditions. Within that space, we can freely choose what to do. Literally nothing is stopping us.

We do have a choice over climate change and ecocide for example. But also, that choice seems quite polarised in our debates about the issue.

Either we can be hair-shirt greens and say we have to cut down to 100 million people living off permaculture in harmony with whatever scraps of traditional ecosystems remain. Or instead, we can trust to the exponential wonder of technology, the glory of the Singularity, to make a safe transition to our next evolutionary step.

I've always been a greeny, but it is honestly a tough call. Life delights in presenting us with polarised dilemmas - the 50/50 choices that maximise the information content of existence. Damned if you do, damned if you don't, etc.

A bit of a diversion in the argument it might seem. Yet really, I'm still talking about the same metaphysical issue. Everything turns out to be dialectically poised in existence for good reason.

So if you are puzzled that the Universe seems to be torn between two purposes - entropy and negentropy - well really they are only the complementary aspects of the one (pansemiotic) process needed to bring existence into existence itself.

I stress semiosis here because the basic idea was recognised by idealists like Schelling and Hegel - as their complementary intellectual response to the Newtonian-inspired Enlightenment realists. But Naturphilosphie and the like didn't get down to the basic infodynamic mechanism like Peirce managed to do.

So this whole thread and the many others like it want to force a hard binary choice. Either brute materialism is right or religious-style idealism is right. By now it should be obvious that - socially - each needs the other as its "other". Our culture is divided sharply because the dichotomisation of our metaphysical choices is the mechanism that drives metaphysical advance (or intellectual negentropy) itself.

But in the end, the bigger story is how the two extremes thus created can find their resolution, their synthesis. That is where naturalism or systems thinking comes up through the middle.

Although no-one ever notices because you still have two cultures at war producing their vast clouds of hot air, or waste heat. Entropification always wins.

I'll repost a longer explanation I gave elsewhere that explains the basic point Hoffman makes in Life's Ratchet. It details the instability or dynamism on which life is founded.

Biophysics finds a new substance

This looks like a game-changer for our notions of “materiality”. Biophysics has discovered a special zone of convergence at the nanoscale – the region poised between quantum and classical action. And crucially for theories about life and mind, it is also the zone where semiotics emerges. It is the scale where the entropic matter~symbol distinction gets born. So it explains the nanoscale as literally a new kind of stuff, a physical state poised at “the edge of chaos”, or at criticality, that is a mix of its material and formal causes.

The key finding: In brief, as outlined in this paper http://thebigone.stanford.edu/papers/Phillips2006.pdf , and in this book http://lifesratchet.com/ the nanoscale turns out to be a convergence zone where all the key structure-creating forces of nature become equal in size, and coincide with the thermal properties/temperature scale of liquid water.

So at a scale of 10^-9 metres (the average distance of energetic interactions between molecules) and 10^-20 joules (the average background energy due to the “warmth” of water), all the many different kinds of energy become effectively the same. Elastic energy, electrostatic energy, chemical bond energy, thermal energy – every kind of action is suddenly equivalent in strength. And thus easily interconvertible. There is no real cost, no energetic barrier, to turning one kind of action into another kind of action. And so also – from a semiotic or informational viewpoint – no real problem getting in there and regulating the action. It is like a railway system where you can switch trains on to other tracks at virtually zero cost. The mystery of how “immaterial” information can control material processes disappears because the conversion of one kind of action into a different kind of action has been made cost-free in energetic terms. Matter is already acting symbolically in this regard.

This cross-over zone had to happen due to the fact that there is a transition from quantum to classical behaviour in the material world. At the micro-scale, the physics of objects is ruled by surface area effects. Molecular structures have a lot of surface area and very little volume, so the geometry dominates when it comes to the substantial properties being exhibited. The shapes are what matter more than what the shapes are made of. But then at the macro-scale, it is the collective bulk effects that take over. The nature of a substance is determined now by the kinds of atoms present, the types of bonds, the ratios of the elements.

The actual crossing over in terms of the forces involved is between the steadily waning strength of electromagnetic binding energy – the attraction between positive and negative charges weakens proportionately with distance – and the steadily increasing strength of bulk properties such as the stability of chemical, elastic, and other kinds of mechanical or structural bonds. Get enough atoms together and they start to reinforce each others behaviour.

So you have quantum scale substance where the emergent character is based on geometric properties, and classical scale substance where it is based on bulk properties. And this is even when still talking about the same apparent “stuff”. If you probe a film of water perhaps five or six molecules thick with a super-fine needle, you can start to feel the bumps of extra resistance as you push through each layer. But at a larger scale of interaction, water just has its generalised bulk identity – the one that conforms to our folk intuitions about liquidity.

So the big finding is the way that contrasting forces of nature suddenly find themselves in vanilla harmony at a certain critical scale of being. It is kind of like the unification scale for fundamental physics, but this is the fundamental scale of nature for biology – and also mind, given that both life and mind are dependent on the emergence of semiotic machinery.

The other key finding: The nanoscale convergence zone has only really been discovered over the past decade. And alongside that is the discovery that this is also the realm of molecular machines.

In the past, cells where thought of as pretty much bags of chemicals doing chemical things. The genes tossed enzymes into the mix to speed reactions up or slow processes down. But that was mostly it so far as the regulation went. In fact, the nanoscale internals of a cell are incredibly organised by pumps, switches, tracks, transporters, and every kind of mechanical device.

A great example are the motor proteins – the kinesin, myosin and dynein families of molecules. These are proteins that literally have a pair of legs which they can use to walk along various kinds of structural filaments – microtubules and actin fibres – while dragging a bag of some cellular product somewhere else in a cell. So stuff doesn’t float to where it needs to go. There is a transport network of lines criss-crossing a cell with these little guys dragging loads.

It is pretty fantastic and quite unexpected. You’ve got to see this youtube animation to see how crazy this is – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-uuk4Pr2i8 . And these motor proteins are just one example of the range of molecular machines which organise the fundamental workings of a cell.

A third key point: So at the nanoscale, there is this convergence of energy levels that makes it possible for regulation by information to be added at “no cost”. Basically, the chemistry of a cell is permanently at its equilibrium point between breaking up and making up. All the molecular structures – like the actin filaments, the vesicle membranes, the motor proteins – are as likely to be falling apart as they are to reform. So just the smallest nudge from some source of information, a memory as encoded in DNA in particular, is enough to promote either activity. The metaphorical waft of a butterfly wing can tip the balance in the desired direction.

This is the remarkable reason why the human body operates on an energy input of about 100 watts – what it takes to run a light bulb. By being able to harness the nanoscale using a vanishingly light touch, it costs almost next to nothing to run our bodies and minds. The power density of our nano-machinery is such that a teaspoon full would produce 130 horsepower. In other words, the actual macro-scale machinery we make is quite grotesquely inefficient by comparison. All effort for small result because cars and food mixers work far away from the zone of poised criticality – the realm of fundamental biological substance where the dynamics of material processes and the regulation of informational constraints can interact on a common scale of being.

The metaphysical implications: The problem with most metaphysical discussions of reality is that they rely on “commonsense” notions about the nature of substance. Reality is composed of “stuff with properties”. The form or organisation of that stuff is accidental. What matters is the enduring underlying material which has a character that can be logically predicated or enumerated. Sure there is a bit of emergence going on – the liquidity of H2O molecules in contrast to gaseousness or crystallinity of … well, water at other temperatures. But essentially, we are meant to look through organisational differences to see the true material stuff, the atomistic foundations.

But here we have a phase of substance, a realm of material being, where all the actual many different kinds of energetic interaction are zeroed to have the same effective strength. A strong identity (as quantum or classical, geometric or bulk) has been lost. Stuff is equally balanced in all its directions. It is as much organised by its collective structure as its localised electromagnetic attractions. Effectively, it is at its biological or semiotic Planck scale. And I say semiotic because regulation by symbols also costs nothing much at this scale of material being. This is where such an effect – a downward control – can be first clearly exerted. A tiny bit of machinery can harness a vast amount of material action with incredible efficiency.

It is another emergent phase of matter – one where the transition to classicality can be regulated and exploited by the classical physics of machines. The world the quantum creates turns out to contain autopoietic possibility. There is this new kind of stuff with semiosis embedded in its very fabric as an emergent potential.

So contra conventional notions of stuff – which are based on matter gone cold, hard and dead – this shows us a view of substance where it is clear that the two sources of substantial actuality are the interaction between material action and formal organisation. You have a poised state where a substance is expressing both these directions in its character – both have the same scale. And this nanoscale stuff is also just as much symbol as matter. It is readily mechanisable at effectively zero cost. It is not a big deal for there to be semiotic organisation of “its world”.

As I say, it is only over the last decade that biophysics has had the tools to probe this realm and so the metaphysical import of the discovery is frontier stuff.

And indeed, there is a very similar research-led revolution of understanding going on in neuroscience where you can now probe the collective behaviour of cultures of neurons. The zone of interaction between material processes and informational regulation can be directly analysed, answering the crucial questions about how “minds interact with bodies”. And again, it is about the nanoscale of biological organisation and the unsuspected “processing power” that becomes available at the “edge of chaos” when biological stuff is poised at criticality.

Not that this resolves what life shares in common with non-life that is a continuum.... — javra

Where's the difficulty? The molecular dynamics of non-life is ruled by the laws of thermodynamics. There are a lot of reactions that are energetically favoured but mostly don't happen as they have to get over some entropic hump. Then life has the information that can construct the machinery - like a helpful enzyme - that gets them over the hump.

So it is all the same chemistry. All that changes is information enters the picture to change the observed frequency of some particular enthalpic reaction.

Here is an open letter from an organic chemist to his colleagues about the unlikelihood of replicating cellular mechanisms forming spontaneously. — Wayfarer

The guy is a creationist. So he would say that. No doubt he is well-intentioned but his reasoning is pretty faulty.

For instance, he says it is a problem that there are thousands of possible lipids that self-assemble into vesicles. It is a general property of these asymmetric molecules with hydrophobic and hydrophilic opposite ends. So which one got life going exactly? It's a great big research mystery as there are just so many for nature to choose from.

It's comical really. In contradiction of what you write, exhibit A is that nature seems so over-exuberant when it comes to spontaneous membrane forming that it makes it hard for any scientist to decide which are the 999 out of a thousand lipids that can't claim to have got life started.

Tour pulls the usual creationist trick. Imagine the world as the sterile laboratory of the synthetic chemist where everything has been pulled apart and kept well away from anything that might let it react or develop a structure.

I think it was like a first day trick in my organic chemistry class that the lecturer got out the pure metalic sodium stored in oil to stop it spontaneously combusting in the atmosphere, scrapped off a slice so we could all watch it burst into flame.

So this is reductionist science at work - nature disassembled in a fashion so humans can put it back together by careful construction.

But that isn't nature. As I described with alkaline vents, you have a real world where entropic gradients are already set up and ready to go. You have a working contrast between hot akaline water one side, cool acidic water the other side. A source and a sink of hydrogen ions.

For a lab chemist, this is a nightmare. His laboratory is already on fire! :)

But for nature, this is an unstable reaction with an inherent dissipative direction that just needs some controlling information to keep it burning. So any first small steps that add stability to the events taking place in the vent will be selected for. And then the next steps is for enough stabilisation to be added for little cells of this metabolic activity to break off and survive as islands of "vent gradient" in the open ocean itself.

It's not rocket science.

How then does the unity of the living ameba as identity emerge from the structures of its non-life components? — javra

The simple answer is the semiotic one. When we talk about that x factor, we are talking about the information that regulates the molecular dynamics and so represents the higher purpose, design and intentionality that gives an organism a recognisable global identity.

An organism is a memory for a structure with a direction. The chemistry of life has the special quality that it is constantly on the verge of falling apart. It only hangs together when energy flows through it in the right direction.

This is one of the little surprises of nature that lay folk find it hard to get their head around. The ordinary expectation - the one that comes from being machine-makers ourselves - is that the foundations of systems must be solid and fixed. You can't build an engine from parts that are right on the verge of disintegrating the whole time.

But life is the opposite. Key structural components like microtubules have a half-life of about 10 seconds. They fall apart, and then - given the right energetic nudge - reform. Only the core informational machinery itself - DNA - has stability. The rest is selected for its instability - as being fundamentally unstable is the trick that allows for informational control over that stability. Instability opens the door to being regulated - pointed back in the right direction - by the higher purpose of an organism.

So this is the big secret of life. Unstable molecular foundations are required to allow stable informational identity to be the one in control. The less able the parts are to maintain an identity, the more the identity becomes something that must be held as a semiotic habit up at the level on which information is being accumulated.

Mate, you're hilarious. Getting all huffy about molecular machinery when you believe existence is a hologram .

Try to keep up Rich. Infodynamics is information and dynamics. Has been all along. They morphic resonance and project onto the astral plane of holographic chemtrails.

Yea. Go morphic resonance. Go holographic mind projection. Give us the different story.

Peter Hoffman's Life's Ratchet is another good new read if you want to understand how informational mechanism can milk the tremendous free energy available at the molecular scale. Life goes from surprising to inevitable once you realise how strongly it is entropically favoured.

I keep telling you. Holographic quantum interference mind projection. Nuff said.

It might have begun being about substance ontology vs process ontology, but now it seems to be about abiogenesis. I have no idea what you mean to criticise.

Why not just read the book?

What's idealism got to do with biosemiotic mechanism exactly?

...could you outline the abiogenesis arguments — MikeL

Check out Nick Lane's The Vital Question. He makes a good case for alkaline hydrothermal vents.

You start with a chemical situation that has all the right ingredients. A porous vent with a flow of warm akaline water, high in CO2, low in oxygen, running into a mildly acidic ocean. Then ferrous oxide in the spongey rock acts as the catalyst. Dissociated hydrogen reacts with CO2 to produce methane via the redox steps of formate and formaldehyde, presuming the ocean on the other side of the thin vent pores is acidic enough to be the proton donor.

These very special chemical conditions - which would also have been common in the early Hadean era sea - thus creates an organic starter fuel in concentrations millions of times greater than normal. You have a factory of organic chemistry, a natural dissipative or energy releasing gradient with complex molecules as the waste products.

So you are halfway to the basic metabolic set-up of life. And now proper organic machinery that can "eat" methane - turn it into the kind of crud that makes cells - is energetically favoured as it removes methane and lets the vent produce more.

Actual cells only have to internalise this existing chemistry by forming a vesicle - and lipid waste does this spontaneously in water. Then adding a membrane protein that can act as a sodium pump, exporting sodium ions to create a source of protons (hydrogen ions) flooding in the other way.

So the argument is that a naturally occurring feature - an alkaline vent - is already doing basic organic metabolism. Only a few minimal additions are needed to encapsulate it and take it to another level.

Life begins when there is the first semiotic step - a membrane pump protein dedicated to maintaining a metabolism sustaining flow by kicking out enough sodium ions, using the energy being released by the consequent redox reaction.

Just like you say, it's all a great big quantum hologram. Far out, man.

Now to remind you again, the OP is about the specific question of the transition from chemistry to biology. Biology says the answer is just add semiotics to dissipative structure. And over the past decade - with rapid advances in our ability to do experiments at the nanoscale of molecular biology - what this means has become pretty precise as a hypothesis.

Now what were you saying about projected mind fields again? It's oh so fascinating. Everyone will try not to laugh.

There is not one shred of evidence supporting the It Just Happened Theory of Everything. — Rich

But it didn't just happen. And there are now many "shreds of evidence" that constrain speculation about how it did happen.

As you say, religion is religion. And new age babble is new age babble even when it is furiously incanting "holographic quantum interference projected mind field hologram".

When faith pretends to be science, then there is a problem. — Rich

Again, you are showing your basic confusion about the epistemology of science. Like any exercise in rationality, it starts by treating any grounding supposition as ... a supposition.

I realise this may be an unfamiliar concept to you.

But the materialists are acting on concrete models here. The field of abiogenesis has moved on from your "chemical soup" parody by 65 years.

So you may claim to be "good with" your holographic-this and your quantum-that - your usual new age babble - however that counts for nothing. It is not an argument, merely a profession of faith.

So the Theory of Spontaneous Everything is a matter of faith and science just wants everyone to buy into it hoping that big words will cover up the religious overtones. — Rich

No. If science were arguing for "spontaneous everything", it would be offering a concrete model. You would have something you could actually critique (although you would also have to read up on it).

But I realise you just love making a noise about holographic this and quantum that. It sounds kind of science-y and deep, doesn't it? :-}

Now, do you have faith or do you actually have some evidence for Spontaneous Everything? — Rich

You seem to be lost as usual. The question was about the transition from non-living to living. So how to get from chemistry to biology.

If you have some specific criticism of current abiogenetic thinking about that, now would be the time to air it. So far you are only parading your ignorance on what is actually being suggested.

Everyone needs to really ruminate over the scientific Genesis story. I mean really digest it fully. There is no tale ever told that is more fantastic. — Rich

Yeah. But you don't appear to have a clue about what science claims.

Chemistry might well regard "a soup" to be in a lifeless and mindless state, as that would be talking about some chemical mixture at equilibrium. But chemistry can also model the emergent or self-organising behaviour of systems that are not at equilibrium. Or even better, are active dissipative structures.

So your basic ignorance of the facts of science are just going to keep tripping you up in these discussions.

I believe it is helpful to fully digest the Scientific Genesis story: A soup of chemicals came together and spontaneously created all life that we see, feel, and acts. Everything. — Rich

For a laugh, can you find a recent paper from the field of abiogenesis which makes such an out-dated claim?

I mean it has been 65 years since Miller and Urey produced some amino acids by zapping a flask of methane, ammonia and other basic compounds with "primordial lightning".

So is 1952 really when you last checked out the literature? :-d

Anyways, long story short, one can still be in the relatively normal range of moods (probably a slight bit more towards acute depression though), and still work within a wordview that keeps in mind the Pessimistic trademarks of relentless desire, the burdens of life, and an understanding of the absurd. — schopenhauer1

Alternatively, the fact that there is a "relatively normal range of moods" fatally undermines structural pessimism as it shows that what is natural is always some organised balance.

Pessimism has to find its force by going to some extreme and claiming "that's how it really is". And yet in nature, the balancing of complementary extremes is what we observe to be the metaphysical norm.

For example, "If looked upon in a transcendental way, like one moving farther and farther from Earth, it is absurd the repetitious nature of each day, and our desires butting against the cultural structures of our environs."

So yes, if we distort our metaphysical point of view to look at our existence in this extreme fashion - the viewpoint from deepest, timeless, space - then our daily routine will seem maximally meaningless. Likewise if we zoom into the molecular scale.

But really, we personally live in terms of time over scales of days to decades to lifetimes, and maybe an active concern for the lives or our kids and grandkids. Or in spatial scale, our homes and gardens, communities, nations, etc.

So our existence ranges over a fair scale in terms of its lived meaningfulness. It spans a few orders of magnitude. But not the 30 or 40 orders of magnitude your pessimistic extremism is forced to assert.

That is not to say that we live in some ideal world at the moment. Our current way of life may be structurally unbalanced - distorted because it has flattened temporality and expanded spatiality. That is, the world system is rushing change and living short-sightedly, while at the same time undermining family, neighourhood and community in favour of disconnected globality.

But again, that make pessimism an impoverished philosophy because it is unable to diagnose what is natural - the eternal balancing act. It takes an extreme view that tries to stand outside of actual lived existence and that is indeed absurd.

science does not know the cause of life. — Wayfarer

But in 100 years, it has narrowed down the options vastly. Which can't be said of any other approach to "knowing".

Perhaps you ought to read some up to date account, like Nick Lane's books, before making such pronouncements.

If you don't find his team's theory of abiogenesis convincing, you are of course free to tell us why.

Each point in space will probably only be able to reflect light in one direction, or at least in a limited number of directions. — Hachem

Now you are on to the quantum mysteries of how light acts as both a particle and a wave.

The photon emitted by a radiating atom goes in every direction as a potential event. It radiates as a spherical wavefront travelling outwards at c. But then an observation - some actual interaction which absorbs that potential - collapse things so it looks like the photon was a particle travelling in a straight line to its eventual target.

So once you get into the quantum level understanding of optics, you really do have to give up what seem to be your commonsense intuitions about light as a ray travelling from this place to that, crossing over, or bending, or whatever.

The idea of a wave and the idea of a particle are the two ways we need to think about it to fully describe the physical mechanics of optics. They are the two complementary viewpoints that encompass the whole of what is going on.

But just as obviously, they are two exactly opposite notions of nature. And that is where the metaphysical problems start .... if you think our models of nature are meant to represent nature in some naively intuitive fashion.

The question now is, how come light rays travel in straight horizontal lines when dealing with mirrors, but suddenly start crossing each other when going though a pinhole or a lens? — Hachem

The behaviour of the light doesn't change. It is scattered in every direction off illuminated objects. But the arrangement of pinholes and image forming planes that reflect that light then samples that light from some particular point of view.

The light does not in fact have to travel in "a straight line", just the "shortest/quickest path". So that is where refraction or bending of the path comes in when you have a lens made of glass.

As to the image inversion issue, when you look into a mirror, you can only see one direction reversed or inverted. You are pointed at the mirror and so your reflection is pointed back at you. But when we are talking about a pinhole casting an image, then we are standing back at yet another point of view where we can see the inversion of direction in the other two planes.

It is like seeing the inversion that would result from the mirror being beneath our feet or off to our side, rather than front on.

In the case of a camera or our eye, we would have to accept the idea that the image is somewhere on or in the lens, and that light from the outside shines through it and projects it on our retina or the sensor area. But how did the image get in the lens if not carried by the light rays?
— Hachem

It might help to think about how a mirror works as well. So what you are talking about with a system of lenses is a way to reflect the light from some distant scene onto a flat surface. That creates "the image". The image is not carried in the reflected light as such. You have to do the extra thing of cutting across that light with a plane that then makes a particular image.

With a mirror, there is no lens getting in the way. And depending on where you stand looking at the image in a mirror, you will see a different view.

The lens then does the extra thing of fixing a point of view. The aperture can be made pin-hole sized so the reflection is an image from just one place - mimicking the way we ourselves impose just one point of view on what we see. We have to stand somewhere even to look at a mirror, which is why we see only one of the vast number of possible images we might see in its reflecting plane.

The lens itself does the other thing of making a very large world of illuminated objects tractably small. This is why it is useful to make the light "cross over" at the pinhole of the aperture. You can then place your retina at a comfortable distance to make the image. The aperture shrinks the "mirror" to a pinhole size, then the "reflection" you are looking at begins to expand again to the other side. It is an extra bit of mechanism to reduce the world to a size that an eye could process without having to be as big as the world it sees.

Hey, when you put it like that, you have an argument that works.

SSRI's are a famous Big Pharma example of selling the public on the notion that depression is due to a lack of a particular molecule.

Scientists working on evolutionary theory could only wish they might get a sniff of some of that Big Pharma dosh.

It's like all a conspiracy? Whoah.

Yep, society is like biology in that it diversifies as it feeds off an entropic gradient.

These pesky ESS evolutionary scientists you complain about turn out to be explaining exactly what you are complaining about. Fancy that.

As a social theory, that applies to all human activity. Churches and all the other theatres of ideas.

The difference of course for science is that it also has the self-regulating mechanisms for calling time on unproductive bullshit. As a model of the world, it has to meet certain objective criteria. It ain't just entertainment.

his kind of stuff gives me a headache, but for those so inclined here is one perspective of the current state of the evolution of evolutionary theory: — Rich

So the article can be summed up as saying everyone working on evolutionary theory agrees the glass has water sitting to the halfway mark, but then "violently disagrees" about whether to call that state of affairs half-full or half-empty.

Business as usual. ;)

(Back 30 years ago, the evo-devo vs modern synthesis issue was rather more controversial - folk might swear the evo-devo glass was empty.)

That life actively strives to throw out new variants and in doing maximises its survival. This is different to Survival of the Fittest where variants are not encouraged by evolution but become useful nonetheless in times of great change. — MikeL

Remember also that Bergson was speculating long before the machinery of DNA was discovered. So after DNA, you have a problem that the ability to replicate or clone a code was just too good.

Selection pressure required that the coding machinery evolve that kind of self-protecting stability just to ward of DNA parasites - snip out the rogue genetic sequences that would insert themselves and get replicated as junk.

So there were a host of adaptations just to make DNA a robust, non mutating, cloning device.

Therefore, of course, there had to be the counter evolutionary pressure to expose DNA to selection pressure. Controlled evolvability also had to evolve. In complex multicellular life, this was achieved for example by a separation of the germ-line. You had sexual reproduction and specialist cells - sperm and eggs - to generate the requisite degree of mutational variety.

Tricks like doubling the chromosomes and having a gene shuffling recombination meant that every individual gene could be tested by the environment individually - not possible to do in bacteria with a simple genome ring that just has to copy the whole gene kitset as one go, risking the loss of as many good genes as bad ones.

Sexual reproduction with doubled chromosomes also means offspring can inherit 0, 1 or 2 doses of any particular gene - copies from both mother and father. So again a way of concentrating the variety in a way that blind natural selection really has some information to dig its teeth into.

So Bergson was right in a handwaving speculative way. Something had to counter natural selection's ability to remove inheritable variety. There had to be a creative element to match the destructive element. It takes two to tango, yin and yang to produce the third thing of an equilibrium balance.

If one is willing to stretch the definition of "consciousness" as being a process of intelligent self making, then organisms do contribute to their evolution by making a choice about how much they need to expose themselves to the vagaries of environmental chance. They play a game of risk and reward which has some optimal balance.

So at the species level, you could say organisms are "conscious" of their world in that they make adaptive shifts over "mental durations" that span many millenia. It is not completely metaphoric because what brains do is also the same kind of "in the moment" adaptive response, fed by creative ideational variety, with the aim of being optimally tuned to learn from the vagaries of life.

But I fear saying that as people then want to go back to strict either/or. Either biology is dead physics or it is alive spirit - as in Bergson's elan vital. My own position is that life and mind are something else - semiotic/dissipative process organised hierarchically over many timescales or durations. (Again, Bergson was essentially right with his cone of memory, but cast that in spiritualist rather than semiotic terms).

Anyway, for a holist or systems metaphysics, it is just expected that any process is formed by its complementary nature. So natural selection would have to be countered by a matching capacity for creative (that is, intelligently tuned) variety production. And since we found out all about DNA, how that smart balancing act is achieved by biological life has become richly understood.