Certain large molecules containing fatty acids—lipids, in the language of chemistry—possess a special property. They automatically self-assemble into a membrane. Their physical nature is to link together into an elastic wall that bends back on itself to create a sphere. You’ve witnessed this process anytime you’ve noticed a bubble emerge from soapy water. Soap bubbles contain molecules similar to those found in the membranes of living organisms—and similar, perhaps, to those in the primeval membranes that originally cordoned off life from not-life, thereby constructing a private room where the story of biology could unfold in fragile safety.
The establishment of a distinct physical boundary around metabolizing and self-replicating chemical processes inaugurated something marvelous. A body. — Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam, in Journey of the Mind
Does anyone have perspective of it or an alternative theory? I am open to a "natural" explanation for life's origin, I'm just not sure an account can be given in natural terms without any miraculous occurrences. — NotAristotle
I believe in metaphysical naturalism: everything that exists is part of the natural world, and all causes are natural. Our understanding of the natural world is incomplete, and this will probably always be the case. It seems silly to focus on one aspect of the world that is not fully understood and jump to the conclusion naturalism is false.What do you believe? — Benj96
What do you mean by "intelligent being"? Why would it matter that we label it such? I grieve when my pets die, but I wouldn't grieve when a machine stopped functioning - even if it exhibited some sort of intelligence.Which as a slight tangent leads me to think that should we create "artificial intelligence" using the same principles and laws of natural selection and replication in computing as nature has done with biology: then we ought to probably treat it as just an intelligent being. — Benj96
I think someone on the forum said this already, but life seems categorically, discretely, quantumly different than non-life; a difference that does not seem explicable by physical mechanisms, no matter the complexity. — NotAristotle
Go ahead, explain fully what you meant, not just in-a-nutshell. — NotAristotle
I'm neither a biologist, chemist nor physicist, but everything I've read in these fields is consistent with this statement (from a class on Physics for Biology and Pre-Health-Care Majors):Okay, so explain it to me in terms of chemistry and physics, I can wait. — NotAristotle
That does not mean it wont fit into that framework either. But currently, is not explained by it. — AmadeusD
Why do we have the words "natural" and "unnatural"? We know what we mean. If we discover a cave deep underground that we don't think anyone could have been in, or land on another planet, or look at an asteroid field through a telescope, there are any number of things we could see that would tell us an intelligence had been at work, and had intentionally made something with an end product in mind. Without intent, the laws of physics don't lead to all things. Terrence Deacon put it this way in Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter when taking about the things that motivated a boy on the beach to skip a stone across the water:I agree with you - that nothing human made in my mind is "artificial" -somehow removed entirely from natural things.
Or "unnatural".
What single thing can natural beings do that is unnatural? — Benj96
Then, after mentioning some of the things that had to be done to manufacture his computer:In contrast, prior to the evolution of humans, the probability that any stone on any beach on Earth might exhibit this behavior was astronomically minute. This difference exemplifies a wide chasm separating the domains in which two almost diametrically opposed modes of causality rule—two worlds that are nevertheless united in the hurtling of this small spinning projectile. — Deacon
No non-cognitive spontaneous physical process anywhere in the universe could have produced such a vastly improbable combination of materials, much less millions of nearly identical replicas in just a few short years of one another. These sorts of commonplace human examples typify the radical discontinuity separating the physics of the spontaneously probable from the deviant probabilities that organisms and minds introduce into the world. — Deacon
That does not mean it wont fit into that framework either. But currently, is not explained by it. — AmadeusD
This is hte point. This is true. And this is why we're talking about it. The emergence of life is mysterious. So we explore :) It's one of hte only things we cannot yet explain under that paradigm. That is interesting in itself, even if it proves merely a longer run-up. — AmadeusD
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