Atoms which make up strawberries don't taste like strawberries either. Biology emerges from chemistry, Smith, not "sorcery". — 180 Proof

Non-sequitur

EDIT: pointing out that emergence occurs under one set of circumstances says nothing about whether or not it occurs in some other set of circumstances.

If you want to argue with scientific precision, you have to separate the neuronal, i.e. physiological, level from the philosophical or psychological. — Wolfgang

This is why I asked.

Maybe listing some guesses at how body/mind exist would show what the problem is.

1) All is physical and body and mind are the same thing.
-problem- How do ideas transfer person to person without a physical transfer of matter? Fail.

2) Brains have the ability to hold non-physicals or mental content. This seems to be consistent with a common view. I'll call it the best option.
Ideas transfer by encoding physical matter by the sender and decoding by the receiver.

3) Brains are physical and mind is something extra-physical that can exist regardless of a physical brain.
-problem-. This would require physically unsupported non-physicals to exist and requires a means of how that could be. Fail.

My point is the best option is the brain holds mental content and at a fundamental level this state is not reducible...or separable.

Non sequitur.

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@bert1 – It must be a slow Monday. :rofl:

I typed all those

:clap:

I would like to hear the explanation of how a strawberry emerges from atoms.

I would like to hear the explanation of how a strawberry emerges from atoms. — Andrew4Handel

I'm no molecular biologist or botanist, but off the top of my head:

atoms –> organic molecules –> DNA –> germination + nitrogen + water + photosynthesis –> strawberry

Broadly, those seem to be the steps.

Imagine a stimulus hitting the eye and being passed on to the brain. There it is associated with patterns and triggers an afferent stimulus that leads to movement of the extremities.
Exactly this process, which is described here biologically (I know, very simplified), can also be described psychologically or otherwise, namely: I see something, think about it and run away.
Both are exactly the same, only in a different language and through a different perspective.
Would you now come up with the idea of wanting to derive the second description from the first or wanting to see a causality between the two? Of course not. But that is exactly what one does when one asks how thoughts arise from neurons, or more generally: how does mind arise from matter.

Atoms which make up strawberries don't taste like strawberries either. Biology emerges from chemistry — 180 Proof

Consciousness might just be the emergent effect out of a biological necessity for adaption within nature. Just like some animals have different tactics of defense and attack, we were evolutionary granted an edge through adaptation, we can change and adapt to anything around us rather than being stuck with having to wait for an evolutionary gain. A position in which evolution took a giant leap, just like when molecules transitioned into the first biological cells. Matter became aware, then with earlier intelligent life forms we became self-aware and the latest step was being consciously aware of self, others and the world.

It might be that there's another step of "awareness" waiting for us in evolution. An awareness of reality that we don't grasp yet, just as the animals before us didn't grasp our intelligence. Since evolution is always happening and transitions are slower than people seem to understand, we might very well be within such a transitionary state right now, taking thousands or hundred of thousands of years to reach from this point in history.

But for the sake of the mind-body problem, we still have to look at evolution of life. All aspects of life have been emergent effects out of chemical reactions. Evolution and biology changes the vial in which this chemistry is on-going and directs chemical reactions to adapt against other chemical reactions (other life forms). But we can't see the vial, because the vial and its internal chemicals are one and the same. It's like the vial holds itself. Or that the vial is our entire eco-system of this planet.

Meaning, just because we can visualize and understand the vial, doesn't mean that we are disconnected from that vial. That would basically be us being part of the vial and then by just thinking about our place within the vial we detach from it. None such thing has any rational or logical causality. Just because we are aware of the vial and the chemical systems that produced our consciousness, doesn't mean that our consciousness is now detached from that vial.

And because of this there's no mind/body-problem. Just as we are part of a larger eco-system, so is our consciousness. We have gut bacteria that affects our thinking, emotion and can alter our minds. So does consciousness exist outside of all of that or is it just an emergent effect out of the chemical connection between the gut bacteria and our neurological systems?

The mind/body-problem is a problem that emerged out of humanity's self-delusion over their own intellectual brilliance. We cannot fathom our consciousness being intertwined with our body/chemistry/vial because we "think" it's different from the physical.

But if consciousness is emergent from the chemistry and from the evolution of our bodies, then what we experience is exactly the effect that the evolution of our body and brain "intended for".

We have this evolutionary apex animal trait but it has put us in an intellectual feedback loop in which our experience of thinking about our experience of thinking feeds back a sense of detachment from the biological, from nature. But this is an illusion, just like we have the illusion of free will, we have the illusion of consciousness being detached from nature.

In a sense, we experience a divine sense of consciousness due to how our consciousness functions, and so we have a problem of accepting our consciousness as being an illusion emergent out of the evolutionary trait of adaptation we were given.

I see no body/mind-problem, I only see the body. And the consciousness is an emergent consequence out of the bodies we have. It is what the data and science points towards and anything else is frankly human beings having species-narcissism.

This is why I think the idea of finding alien life or creating artificial intelligence is so scary for so many people. Because it is a threat to the hegemony of humanity and our deep experience of our consciousness.

I for one, actually welcome any kind of separate intelligence, be it aliens or self-aware AGI, because at that stage, humanity might become more humble and let go of that species-narcissism. It might be the stepping stone towards a new level of awareness in evolution.

You use the word ideas and other words associated with mind so I suspect you subconsciously do think in terms of mind/body as most of us do. But I agree it is ultimately based on an evolved state of physical matter.

Some of the confusion may be language like do our brains hold ideas or are ideas the exact configuration of our brains? I think they are the same but you have two ways to state it. I don't see the problem, thinking in terms of held content, if we can get back to an understanding of the physical basis.

No.

:eyes:

Surely strawberries only consist of atoms?

or maybe there is some other unknown component of strawberries that gives them their juicy red succulent strawberry qualia...

Actually language itself such as the English language we share is an example of a hierarchy of rule making our brains support that goes beyond biology. To communicate we need brains with the capability to hold content, a common language and a two way physical connection. Agree?

No, nothing goes beyond biology. It's just the descriptive level. Imagine someone threatens me with a gun, I see that and run away.
Described biologically, this means: a stimulus hits my eye, is sent to the brain, associates patterns there, and there is an afferent stimulus that generates a movement.
Described psychologically, this means that I become aware of a danger, my brain activates an escape reflex and releases hormones.
Both times I consciously experience a situation and describe it with different sign systems.
In biology, the psychological/philosophical concept of consciousness means - I'll call it - neuronal excitement or orientation etc., whatever, it's exactly the same.
Nobody would think of seeing the biological description as causal for the psychological description.
But that is exactly what makes the mind-body problem.

I still see a problem that everything we experience can't be explained by biology or even the broader category of physical matter. What is information? Does it show up on the periodic table of elements? So you need some way to explain it.

You can be complacent and say information is just an abstraction but we can do better. I'm actually on your side here by pointing out that information exists only as our biological brains holding mental content. Brain(mental content).

Information is biology and a contained non-physical component... so information is brain biology only and not all physical matter. We also have limits on the what mental content we can contain. Aptitude, access, environment, time constraints are all limiting how much information we can process and retain.

Imagine a tree. A painter will describe its form and color, a physicist its atomic structure, a biologist its biostructure, etc.pp.
It's always the same tree. It is only described from different perspectives and with different categorical means.
Just apply that to the mind-body problem and you'll see that it's really a bogus problem.
We are all biological beings - right? Then we must also be biologically describable. If we want to describe consciousness biologically, we should use a biologically usable term for it, e.g. nervous excitability in the sense of an orientation performance or some other terms.
Information is not a biological term, nor is mental.
When information is used in the context of biology, it is more in everyday language to represent complex relationships, but it is not a biological analytical term.
So don't keep mixing biology with psychology/philosophy.

In theory you could be able to to describe consciousness biologically but we can't now and may never. Sometimes, with difficult problems a method used to find a solution is to use place holders or end points or intermediate results. I probably take those approaches to mind/body to be pragmatic because a biology only method isn't attainable. It might be usable utility verses theoretical perfection.

It is an epistemological question how to describe something. Of course, psychology describes consciousness from a very different angle than biology does. So when we have a psychological question about consciousness, we consult psychology. But we wouldn't think of asking biology how psychology should work.

I would like to hear the explanation of how a strawberry emerges from atoms. — Andrew4Handel

Me too! This mystery must be solved pronto!

Occam's barber is the fix.

I'm not convinced that psychology does describe consciousness or that it is a final authority or even a science.

If I stick to what I can observe then biological brains support consciousness, consciousness doesn't exist without brains and shouldn't be speculated on in a form separated from the brain.
The category error notion will just detour you from the fundamental relations between brain and mind you should be focusing on.

All aspects of life have been emergent effects out of chemical reactions — Christoffer

According to what evidence?

There's a difference in kind between inorganic material and organic beings. Ernst Mayr, one of the architects of the modern evolutionary biology insists that life is fundamentally different from inanimate matter. He says 'The discovery of the genetic code was a breakthrough of the first order. It showed why organisms are fundamentally different from any kind of nonliving material. There is nothing in the inanimate world that has a genetic program which stores information with a history of three thousand million years.'

The idea that ‘life is chemistry plus information’ implies that information is ontologically different from chemistry. The strongest argument in support of this claim has come from Hubert Yockey in the application of Shannon's information theory to biology. Yockey shows that heredity is transmitted by factors that are ‘segregated, linear and digital’ whereas the compounds of chemistry are ‘blended, three-dimensional and analogue’ (source). Accordingly, there's a difference in kind - an ontological distinction, if you can get your head around that - between crystal lattices and the structures of DNA.

Your claim is simply materialist wishful thinking, with no basis in science or philosophy.

According to what evidence? — Wayfarer

According to the theories of how life started. That's the closest we are to an answer, anything else is extreme wild speculations combined with religious nonsense. There's nothing else than to look at the facts that exist and extrapolate from that.

There is nothing in the inanimate world that has a genetic program which stores information with a history of three thousand million years. — Wayfarer

Just stating that there's nothing in the inanimate world that has a genetic program is pretty much false by its own rhetoric. There's is something in the world that has a genetic program, DNA. Stating that there's nothing in the world like DNA is ignoring that DNA exists as part of this world. This is the type of detachment that we humans do that precedes logic. We categorize stuff based on our opinions first, then we position these categories as unrelated. DNA is most plausibly a result of chemistry out of RNA enzymes, this is what's "up to date" in research. We don't yet know how that chemistry fully functions, or how long it takes to form, but it's still more plausible than any other explanation.

So, the most plausible line of causality is that inanimate matter formed complex behaviors over the course of millions or billions of years based on the right conditions. We don't have a unified theory between quantum mechanics and general relativity yet, but the universe still hangs together and the possible theories are there to explain that link. Just because the link isn't fully answered doesn't mean it's therefore false because there are enough conditions to suggest verified observations.

A fundamental misunderstanding with science is that everything needs to be hard evidence true, but in reality, a theory of quantum mechanics can be partially correct but not be the final theory. Otherwise, we wouldn't be able to use stuff like the flatscreen you're reading this text on. A theory of life does not have to be fully complete to explain the origins of life in the most plausible way possible at this time in scientific history.

The idea that ‘life is chemistry plus information’ implies that information is ontologically different from chemistry. — Wayfarer

No, this is separating them after the fact, after it evolved into it. It's like saying that something could never be as it is because you can't combine its current existence with any idea of how it formed because of its current attributes. And it does not mean the formation of it never took place and has a plausible explanation as an emergent event or even a dividing event between information and pure chemistry, only that the current form functions in the way it does. That is just an observation of the emergent attributes we see today, not a theory of actual formation. The pre-Big Bang existence might be extremely abstract to us in this universe, but judging its existence based on the rules, laws and principles of the universe we live within as an argument against any pre-existing conditions that formed our universe is faulty logic. We extrapolate a plausible idea based on moving as close to the event as possible and theorize through concepts that seem to break the laws of physics that we experience. Probability is the only factor we can work with. Observation of attributes a system has does not change probable formation, it only adds to such theories with new information needed to fully explain everything.

A computer's storage system is essentially inanimate but stores complex information. It does not store stuff in a way that is natural to us as humans, but decoding that information makes it possible for us to see an image or read this text. Is this information different from the chemistry/physics of the computer storage? Or is the information just an emergent effect of the state in which the storage chemistry/physics is composed of? How can you tell the difference? The physical changes as we change the information, they're linked in a way in which you cannot remove the other or else lose the whole.

Life, or rather RNA, did most likely form as a molecular system that entered different states depending on its surroundings. Just like the most basic computers in the early days of computing only had extremely basic ones and zeroes only able to form rather simplistic results, the simplistic first versions of RNA structures might have just been able to interact in ways closely similar to basic chemical reactions we see in other chemical mixtures.

But over the course of billions of years, these chemical reactions could very well increase in complexity, just like the increasing complexity in computing through new forms of chemical/physical combinations enabling more interactions and complexities possible. With the increase in complexity of these pre-RNA structures, at some point, some very simple and extremely basic "information" started to be stored and interactions with other molecular structures started forming links or repulsion based on the conditions the structure was in, and in relation to other structures. If structures bonded over the similarity of basic information, those structures could have increased in "computational power" of this "storage".

This would enter the structure more closely resembling the RNA structures we know of, continuously increasing complexity. A kind of singularity of biological "computation" in which RNA linked together in further complex ways.

None of this would dismiss information and chemistry being separated in how we observe these systems today. The division could in itself be an emergent factor, maybe even a crucial point in which the needed complexity for life formed.

Saying "‘life is chemistry plus information’ implies that information is ontologically different from chemistry" does not disprove that they both formed from a single point together, especially since they're so intertwined in the compound of what makes up life that they cannot exist independent of each other.

Your claim is simply materialist wishful thinking, with no basis in science or philosophy. — Wayfarer

How in the world can you conclude that what I say has no basis in science? I'm doing a simple overview in a "short" forum post based on the most plausible extrapolation out of where science is at the moment on this topic. You've selected a specific source that in itself criticizes some aspects of theories, but that's like Einstein's criticism against quantum physics, it doesn't mean quantum physics is wrong, only that there's a part of it needed to be revised or expanded upon to unify theories into a whole.

I'm also very allergic to the result of his argument as it has become a foundation for pseudo-science nonsense by creationist institutes doing bad science to prove against evolution.

I much rather look at the consensus for a scientific topic than use a single topic within it as a foundation for a dismissal of the entire field's conclusions of probable theories. It's like saying that I like one of the String theory explanations and therefore that is the correct one.

The emergent attributes of a system do not contradict the formation of that system just because its evolved nature has differences that might not have been present at formation.

Just stating that there's nothing in the inanimate world that has a genetic program is pretty much false by its own rhetoric. There's is something in the world that has a genetic program, DNA. — Christoffer

It is not 'false by its own rhetoric' which is a nonsense sentence. There is nothing in the inanimate world that has a genetic program. How that came about is what is at issue. So far, abiogenesis is simply an assumption of 'what must have happened' in the absence of another kind of explanatory framework or mechanism.

There is nothing in the inanimate world that has a genetic program. — Wayfarer

That is a better clarification of it. But still just a description of how things are now, not how it formed. If the inanimate evolved into something with a genetic program, you can see the separation between the inanimate of today and the genetic, but that doesn't mean the inanimate at some point and under certain conditions produced a genetic program that today seems disconnected. If we don't know exactly how it came to be, concluding it to be "unnaturally" separate in the way you do, is as much wild speculation, if not more than abiogenesis describes it, which has more logic to it than anything else.

So far, abiogenesis is simply an assumption of 'what must have happened' in the absence of another kind of explanatory framework or mechanism. — Wayfarer

It has more foundation in science than anything else. Just because a theory isn't fully explained or solved doesn't mean "anything goes" and anything else is equally plausible, it is not. And observed or calculated aspects that may on surface contradict the theory, usually does not contradict but complement and fine-tune a theory closer to scientifically objective truth.

Quantum physics does not compute with general relativity, which is so tested that there's no doubt it is correct. Does that mean that because quantum physics doesn't compute with general relativity right now, general relativity is wrong? No. Does it mean that all quantum physic theories are equally correct because none of them has been fully implemented into a unified theory? No.

I'm not gonna pick and choose a theory or explanation that I prefer personally, that's just pure bias. I'm extrapolating a possible causality of events based on what is currently the most likely. If the counter argument against that is a more complex and unlikely causal line of events or some wild speculation that has more in common with religious fairy tales, then theres a burden of proof on the one at the higher speculative level. And adjustments to how we categorize separation between information, genetics and chemistry does not equal abiogenesis wrong, it just means we have to incorporate new information into how we form a theory closer to scientific truth.

And we've already been here with so many other scientific breakthroughs in history. Right at the edge of understanding there's a high number of wild speculations in battle with each other and when eventually a proven solution comes along it's usually pretty unspectacular and logical and then people move on. There are so many theories accepted today as just part of how the world and universe works, things that we use in technology and applied sciences and it's just part of "boring reality". This will keep on going as long as we do science.

But I'm amazed every time someone concludes something as "we will never know". Scientists learn new stuff all the time, conclude theories all the time. We're just a few years after proving the Higgs field being real. We've just proven gravitational waves being real. Before that people did the same kind of biased speculation and using the lack of evidence as a foundation for any kind of less plausible theory.

Even if people aren't scientists, they can still apply a form of scientific method when trying to speculate about things around them. How to find facts, how to judge facts, checking sources, checking what quality studies and publications have, do they have meta studies etc.?

What I see as a major problem today is that most people focus more on the conclusions of a single study or a philosophical text than to look at the everything surrounding it. How did it come about? Who are involved? Are there studies of these studies? What's the general consensus, what does the consensus think of studies critical of that consensus etc. etc.

The question I need answers to... why would I not form a hypothetical line of causality based on abiogenesis? Is there a better theory at this time? Is there a better framework to explain it that is respectful of the science behind it? There's a high level of plausible events in abiogenesis that I simply cannot find in other speculations. Even panspermia requires something like it to have occurred somewhere else. Even if we have aliens actively creating life on earth, their own lives requires a formation. The most plausible requires something more plausible in order to be toppled even if everything is on a hypothetical level. Not fully proven does not mean "anything goes".