• Rich
    3.2k
    But even if I could explain how the entropic gradients were overcome, how life managed to breach boundary after boundary,MikeL

    It's simple. The chemicals get together and become "dedicated". After that It All Just Happens Naturally.

    The question is exactly how fantastic a story is one willing to accept to eliminate the Mind. One way or another, no matter how many big words science makes up (and this is totally limited by their imagination and the funding they receive), ultimately their explanation is and has to be, It Just Miraculously Happened".
  • apokrisis
    6.8k
    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.
  • Galuchat
    808
    ...a close comparison of pierce's semiotic pan-psychism to both standard materialism and Berkley's idealism. — sime

    Please provide a synopsis. If we're lucky, the thread may tolerate a close comparison. Otherwise, we are left with a dispute "over the best flavour of ice-cream."
  • MikeL
    644
    It's simple. The chemicals get together and become "dedicated". After that It All Just Happens Naturally.Rich

    There you go, I knew there was a reason. The anti-entropic gradient of dedication.

    I don't have too many problems eliminating the mind though. I can eliminate my senses one by one until I am left with empty space and thoughts manifested by humming neurons. Maybe I'm missing something.
  • apokrisis
    6.8k
    Yea. Go morphic resonance. Go holographic mind projection. Give us the different story.
  • MikeL
    644
    Interesting. I think I would like to reach that.
  • Rich
    3.2k
    informational mechanism can milk theapokrisis

    Ah! A change of story. Chemicals have morphed into an informational mechanism that milks. Isn't a mind required to create information and for milking? No matter, transforming chemicals into humans is easy when all you need is a few words.

    Any other stories you wish to share?
  • Rich
    3.2k
    Anything is better than milking chemicals. Do they do it on a stool?

    One doesn't have to have any background in science to read any of these books. All you need to do is look for the first sentence in the book where chemicals become "dedicated". It's right there where the miracle begins.
  • apokrisis
    6.8k
    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.
  • Rich
    3.2k
    Infodynamics is information and dynamicsapokrisis

    Double talking is all about using big words and talking fast in such a way that people can't trap the misdirection.

    Information is Mind. Only in your world does a tube of sulfur process information. Any philosopher can easily point out the Science Delusion. Every explanation from science must have it. Mind has to be hidden somewhere, whether it be selfish, dedicated, milking, kicking, or information processing.

    At least Whitehead was intellectually honest and not trying to hide Mind somewhere in some verbs and adjectives.
  • apokrisis
    6.8k
    Mate, you're hilarious. Getting all huffy about molecular machinery when you believe existence is a hologram .
  • Rich
    3.2k
    Molecular machinery, created out of thin air by some story teller. Science knows how to spin a good yarn. They get lots of practice from fundraising in order to keep their jobs.

    The Story

    The human body just miraculously all came together. All it is self-made machine. Yes, the molecules began to talk to each other, and look at each other, and love each other, and argue with each other and at times they would hold hands and sing to the Lord. Oh yes, that Mind. That is just an illusion. As for this story, it is just part of the Science Delusion.
  • Wayfarer
    20.6k
    Here is an open letter from an organic chemist to his colleagues about the unlikelihood of replicating cellular mechanisms forming spontaneously.

    With respect to life being an emergent property, the question I would raise is this: in every instance of living organisms, life seems to direct the process. There is everywhere, always, and on every level, purposive activity which is directed at the ends of homeostasis, survival and reproduction. Part of what this enables is evolutionary development, i.e. the gradual or even sudden diversification of forms into many diverse types, which act symbiotically.

    The problem I have with the theory that this is a consequence of 'entropification' is the complete absence of any acccount of intentionality from that process. That element of intentionality is what, I think, we are looking for, because in its absence, the claim appears to be that this is 'something that just happened'. Why it happened is left out of the account - it happens from sheer physical necessity, along with an element of chance; as Jacques Monod says in his famous book of that name. Actually even to ask 'why' is probably regarded as a retrograde question.

    That is why I think some kind of orthogenetic theory must provide an answer: that universe indeed possesses an innate tendency towards evolutionary development. But it is just that kind of tendency that naturalist accounts wish to avoid.
  • MikeL
    644
    Thanks Wayfarer, I will give it a solid read tomorrow. I tend to agree with you in the main. I have to say though I've been reading up on Apokrisis's dissipative systems and laws of entropy and have taken a knock back several steps. I will have to regroup my thoughts and come at it again.
  • Galuchat
    808
    I have found no practical way to define life. — Pollywalls

    I provided the following general definition of life in the "What is Life?" thread (participants included Apokrisis, Javra, Metaphysician Undercover, and Wayfarer): The condition extending from cell division to death, characterised by the ability to metabolise nutrients.

    Perhaps this needs to be modified to include creative power?
  • Rich
    3.2k
    It is very easy for science to explain everything on paper. It simply injects human capabilities and qualities into chemicals and removes all mention of the Mind. And Poof! it all just happens naturally, including machines arguing among each other.

    But among all of this story telling, there is a real mind and a real purpose. Science had become a mass marketer of drug chemicals. The $trillion pharmaceutical industry depends upon people buying into this story - that they are just some chemical machines that can be fixed by other chemical machines using chemicals. That is why Big Pharm is everywhere now - in educational institutions, in government, in NGOs, it is ubiquitous. It funds everything that suits its purpose and goals. But dehumization has its costs. Tens of thousands - maybe hundreds of thousands are being killed by pharmaceuticals every year and it is being done with impunity. As for the health of humans, it is retrograding:

    http://www.newsweek.com/unhealthy-food-choices-contribute-one-five-deaths-globally-665957

    "The findings also showed that while people are living longer, more years of their lives are spent being sick."

    It should also be noted that the U.S, which is by far the biggest user of pharmaceutical chemicals among developed nations has the absolute worse life expectancy. This is a direct result of the Science Delusion. Science it's different when it crosses the ocean. It is not merely a philosophical parlor game. This is literally about life and death.
  • javra
    2.4k
    a thing becomes another thing when it has all the essential parts. a dead thing becomes alive when it completely fits the definition of a living thing. until that it is dead.Pollywalls

    To me it’s a complex issue (which I’m still taking a hiatus from for the moment). Wanted, though, to clarify the terminology you’ve expressed: a dead thing, by all common definitions, is a thing that once was alive. The main theme of this tread is not how life can follow death but, rather, how life can emerge from non-life/inanimate things.

    Taking a more vertical approach: Think of an individual cell, like an ameba for example. One of its lipids, on its own, is not alive (nor dead; it is merely non-life). The same applies with all of its individual molecular components (which, as an interesting aside, can all in due measure be stated to hold particle-wave duality). How then does the unity of the living ameba as identity emerge from the structures of its non-life components? Again, it is to me a complex, and not yet resolved, issue.
  • Rich
    3.2k
    Life needs life to exist. It needs vegetables, fruit, etc. to continue to survive. Without it, it perishes. Try surviving on a bottle of chemicals. Life was there at the beginning and then it began to create - in some cases some really weird stories. I'm sure you know the one that certain races are less than human.
  • javra
    2.4k
    Life was there at the beginning and then it began to create - in some cases some really weird stories.Rich

    :) Yea, I guess you could think of it that way; but then these tails we tell/create latter on serve as the bed we made and need to sleep in/partake of, so to speak.
  • Rich
    3.2k
    Not everyone sleeps so easily. Some are c so dehumanized they become simple fodder for the disgusting machinations of other human beings. The whole basis door slavery and genocide is that the victims are less than human beings. It has morphed into human beings are just chemicals that are too be used without regard to humanity because there is no such thing.

    As one obnoxious post put it we are just a "molecular machine."
  • javra
    2.4k


    Agreed.

    As it happens, new tales are always being told. Helps out when the enslaved too have a voice.

    As regard this thread, I was referring more to the uni-versal tale/logos ... to make my previous post clearer
  • Rich
    3.2k
    Yes, it's not all that much fun when you are on the wrong side of the molecular machinery. The Nazis exterminated tens of millions of people of all ethnicities and religions in the most grotesque manners on the basis that they were not human. What we have here is a clever repackaging.
  • Jenna Carlsson
    1
    Intentionality intrigued me. But given the right conditions, life is inevitable. All living things here have been expanding their capabilities to their needs for 3.5 billion years. Our bodies exhibits our mind. There is no definitive line when something is life and when something is non-life. I know some would argue that a virus is not life because it can not metabolize anything and uses hosts genetic machinery to replicate themselves. But RNA is very close to DNA. It is using the same language as we use to get our message out. Everything we are is directed from our DNA and the DNA can only act via being transcribed into RNA. It is called the central dogma in biochemistry DNA to RNA to Protein because all life shares this feature. For me the question is not how non life transitions into life or even how we have developed into such majestic and capable creatures because there is no intention. Only possibilities. And it is these possibilities which I think describes the universe best. Reverence comes from awe I guess. I wish everyone knew.
  • apokrisis
    6.8k
    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.
  • javra
    2.4k


    For my part, a very nicely expressed thesis of what biological autopoiesis consists of. I find nothing here to contradict.

    Not that this resolves what life shares in common with non-life that is a continuum rather than a plank-scale-like distinction of quality/attributes … but again, I for my part will let this issue rest.
  • apokrisis
    6.8k
    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.
  • Rich
    3.2k
    What yarn spinners fail to realize and are surprised at is that laypeople find it really funny that chemists fall in love with chemicals and make them into little human beings, and technologists fall in love with computers and make them into little human beings, etc. etc etc. Tell me, in your yarn, what blend of chemicals would you recommend as a marriage partner? Sulphur + Oxygen maybe?

    Tell me more about how chemicals share information. Do they have little brains?
  • apokrisis
    6.8k
    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.
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