Thanks Nils Loc, these are enjoyable poems.

My OP is suggesting a conceptual location for Creativity as eminating from just beneath a boundary layer, and that it can only arise if the underlying system has a superfluous 'energy' to power it.

Here is the best image of it that I can find on the net.



In this image the secondary wavelets would represent creativity hitting against the boundary layer of the new wave front, and the distance between the wavefront at time t and the new wavefront would represent the superfluous component required for Creativity to function.

Hi T Clark,
I'm just calling it a possum for convenience. It was a possum like marsupial ancestor at science's best guess.

This page has a good image of it

If we consider that every lifeform has a nucleic acid code (DNA or RNA), then by comparing the similarity and variance between codes we can construct a sphere (the nodal sphere) that shows how they are related. This collective tumbleweed of nodes would constitute the single entity or organism - life.

There is so much strange behaviour though and adaptations of lifeforms that suggest an active awareness of the environment rather than sequential stepping through genome combinations, that unless there is communication through the nodes of the nodal network (a biological hacking of the system) the network itself has no applicable value other than to illustrate connections. A lack of communication through the nodes would also suggest that it is not one life form, as the nodal model would suggest.

In biology I believe that if you can conceive of it, and it makes logical sense, it happens. I wonder what nodal communication would look like (gene sharing perhaps?), but true communication would mean that an outerlying node could obtain information about an inner lying node by routing through several intermediary nodes. It could then use this information to sabotage it, as parasites do so remarkably well when they hijack the inner workings of organisms.

Life is not here to survive. If it were, it would have evolved into a very simple organism which could very strongly withstand the pressures of time, it would not have evolved into complex, sophisticated, and extremely delicate organisms, if it only wanted to survive.. — Metaphysician Undercover

This is a great point Metaphysician Undercover.

I am still trying to figure it out as I go along too. You looked at the start of a chain of logic. There is one organism in the sense that they are connected in a single nodal network called life. To put it another way, if we look at the evolutionary tree we can trace it back to a single point (well, there is that tardigrade that doesn't fit in).

Another way of looking at this point is the probability landscape of survival (the adaptive landscape) is full of related genomes that can be traced back to a single origin.

To address your question on:

The process is described as "closing off", or limiting possibilities, yet the claim is that what is occurring "is the creation of new possibilities". So unless we assume two distinct types of possibility, one which is being limited, and the other which is being created, it appears to be contradictory to say that closing off possibilities is really creating possibilities. — Metaphysician Undercover

I think it is important to understand the context of the statement which is about the adaptive landscape. If we consider a landscape that is undulating up and down and place a ball on it. If it rolls into a dip, that is good. If it climbs a hill it will die. On the flat (left, right, backward, forwards) it is neutral. These represent evolutionary pressure on an organism. When on neutral ground there is none.

So a probability network spread out over the ground closely mirrored by the populations of genomes that follow it. Everyone will avoid the hill. But what about if the ball is caught in a bowl that is suddenly thrust upward. Everything in the bowl will die. When the bowl returns to the neutral position we have all the surrounding probability combinations that created the initial genomes inside the bowl. They will once again grow into the bowl, but they will not necessarily follow the same combination they did the first time. New possibilities are being created. Where before the combination led to tigers, now they may lead to meercats. As it gets closer to the centre of the bowl though the probability combinations close off.

I hope I didn't masacre StreetlightX's quote.

I am also having difficulty with the model Metaphysician Undercover. It works, but there are areas that I am having great difficulty getting to fit. For example the Creative Slope I spoke of - to get around your idea of intentionality, can't exist because that would mean there could be no devolution. Instead if there is a Creative Slope it would have to be at 90 degrees to the terrain (a gravity). Even invoking a spherical nodal network, I am still having problems with matching some observations of life with the idea, like how the parasite that creates the zombie snail fits in. Nonetheless, I think it's a good heuristic.

Togographically attractors could be thought of as minimas (enhancing survivability), as genomes converge on the minima or skirt the minima convergence could occur.

Life had to begin moving almost immediately upon its conception, lest it sink immediately back into the void, which I imagine was bubbling a lot more furiously back then given the fragility the first lifeforms must have had. It chose a direction and spread outward. We can call this direction of evolution the Slope of Creativity and can apply the properties of a slope to it. The Slope of Creativity is distinguishable from singularities which are features of the topography.

Even with maxima and minima and attractors popping up and down at various points, unless we invoke intentionality to the movement of the genome we still end up with relatively unmoving genomes. They will shuffle about on the spot. The way around intentionality is to invoke a slope. (This slope acknowledges the presence of a Creative Force that permeates all things and is directional).

The Slope of Creativity would impose directionality on the general movement of genomes, ensuring the marbles are rolling (down hill) all the time irrespective of maxima and minima. Behind the moving genomes are the genomes of dinosaurs and sabre tooth tigers etc which have not been revisited by life.

When we invoke the Slope of Creativity, we could have our attractors tugging at the genome pools as they passed by, our maxima providing slopes to roll up and back down (evolutionary culdesacs) and our minima being dips they may become stuck in.

The Slope of Creativity would also allow an organism to approach, and crest a maxima and come down the other side without being obliterated, so long as the maxima was not too high.

It is possible even with a Slope of Creativity that some genomes get trapped at the base of a maxima or in a minima) in which case we would get very interesting flow patterns around them.

And what would happen on the lee side of a non-crested maxima? It would open up new space when the maxima gate was lowered again.

The opening and closing of the gates as the marbles rolled through the terrain would create different sets of genome clusters, moving together. This does raise the issue of potentially moving through a set of genomes previously visited if some of the singularities were the same.

I'm starting to genetically drift myself now.

Yeah, it opens up a much more interesting toolbox.

Defining the singularities in a genomic landscape in a topological map would be the challenge. For example, in a topographic field the maxima would be best thought of as the crest that the genomic marbles would want to roll away from, down the sides of. The minima would be what they roll into. The valleys, from our previous discussions would be where the genomes 'want to' go (ie they would follow the path of least resistance).

You might define attractors similar to those things in the pinball machines that suck the ball onto them, or as weaker more gravity like entities gradually turning the general direction of genomic mutation. This is an appealing idea. In the case of the adaptive landscape attractors might direct genome variation directionally, so they do enter the abyss to as great an extent. I wonder what type of force could act like that on the genome that is not a maxima or minima?

The other point to consider with the rising and falling of the adaptive topographic landscape is if the marbles themselves do not fall into some type of rhythm of movement. The larger the groups of marbles, the more that they should act like a group and wash around together.

What are your thoughts on it StreetlightX?

However because the landscape is multidimensional, paths closed off by speciation in one dimension may open up paths along other dimensions. What is at stake here is the creation of new possibilities. In other words, the adaptive landscape is not just a series of possibilities but a series of changing possibilities, which are themselves dependent upon the actual paths of speciation. Because these paths themselves are contingent (upon the changes in actual environment), the adaptive landscape cannot be seen as a simple set of pre-existing possibilites which are then realized by the random walk of evolution or not. Possibilities themselves are subject to change such that the landscape evolves along with the species that populate it.

This is why I think the checkerboard-of-lights image is not quite right: such a image locates change only at the level of the species, which move across a board of fixed lights. The trick is to imagine the lights themselves warping the board as they flicker across it. Again at stake here is the necessity to secure the the possibility of novelty: if the board is fixed, it becomes possible, in principle, to exhaust the 'combinations' of lights turned on and off across it. But evolution is not just a matter of combinatorics: one must think the coming-into-being of the network itself. — StreetlightX

After all that, I think I just ended up rewording you StreetlightX.

This sums up my thinking so far. What do people think? Can you follow the logic? Are there any errors in the logic? Are there any insights you can glean or directions you can suggest?

At the instant the first twinkling of a genome appeared, an invisible probability landscape (of existence through time) shot up around it and bubbled like quantum foam under a sheet. The bubbling was much slower than quantum foam though.

The crests represented survival of a genome and the troughs were annihilation. The new life did not have to traverse the landscape. It could have grown its population right where it was without any change to its genome, hoping the probability crest it was on never collapsed. (this probability landscape considered the ability of the genome organism to survive given the current state of the environment in which is found itself- and so it is called the adaptive landscape as well).

The probability landscape foretold that if you want to go from point A to point B (from a possum to a kangaroo) through alterations to the genome, here is the path- follow the ridges (crests). The population, in order to traverse the path would need to modify its genome in sequential steps. Only a certain section of the population would make each step, and if successful would balloon out into its own population.

While this is happening the probability landscape is also shifting uneasily. Crests are rising and troughs are forming. A trait that may be advantageous today (like swimming in the water) may not be advantageous tomorrow - (the water dries up).

Life spread out radially through the probability landscape by alterations to the genome as is required for movement along it. Could it see the path and direct the genome to some extent, or was its spread blind? That is a question this OP wrestles with. By invoking populations we don't need a sentience to accomplish the movement. It's like dragging a mat over the landscape, some parts will go into the dip others will go onto the crest. This does not rule out that it may have been directed.

Thus life can be thought of as a group of branching tentacles spreading from the same original genome, each genome a single step differentiated from that before or after it. Or more technically as a set of interlocking nodes: [source http://www.molecularecologist.com/2015/02/bigger-on-the-inside/]

It gets really weird when one genome is dependent on another genome for its survival. This existence of the second genome would form part of the crest for the genomic map of the first and yet would occupy a vastly different place on the actual genomic map, given that each step is say one change of the genome.

For example a herbivore may depend on the acacia plant for survival. On the genomic map they are in very, very different places - so different are their genomes. And yet the existence of the acacia means that a genome that can allow the digestion of acacia - forms the crest of the herbivore.

- OR the rise of man may send it's probability landscape into a trough.

So the very presence of each different genomic variation creates new probability waves proximally and distally in the landscape.

ONE THING IS CERTAIN - If life stopped evolving it would perish: It must mutate lest the crest it is on sink into the abyss. Is this Creative Evolution?

And if we know the speed of time causing the radial expansion, and the size of the adaptive landscape at different points in time....oh crap, the size of the adaptive landscape hasn't changed. The depth of the interface has -the heirachy of life which has built up like a soil on top of it.

I think we can also surmise that the sphere is hollow, as life is riding time, and time is not washing through a predetermined state of life, merely illuminating it - or is it?

There is a very interesting question here. In the outwardly expanding sphere (through time), new areas appear like great cavities in the sphere- or as blank canvases of the adaptive landscape. Eventually they will fill with genomes. The thing is the genomes do not spontaneously appear inside the space, they must, as genetics says drift into it from the edges. This is an argument against a force of life, and a potential pandoras box I wouldn't mind exploring. Could you argue that the adaptive landscape is the force?

But the idea of genetic drift is itself no entirely accurate. A better name would be genetic hopping. Each variant is a hop further along. This is not pure semantics, as in the race toward the centre of the empty cavity by the genome, those that can jump the further the fastest will get there first and can set up shop before the others.

Here's an extract from an article on Jumping Genes - also called Transposons. Transposons are long portions of the genome that jump about from one section of the DNA strands to another, often causing deleterious effects to the organism.

"Transposons Are Not Always Destructive
Not all transposon jumping results in deleterious effects. In fact, transposons can drive the evolution of genomes by facilitating the translocation of genomic sequences, the shuffling of exons, and the repair of double-stranded breaks. Insertions and transposition can also alter gene regulatory regions and phenotypes. In the case of medaka fish, for instance, the Tol2 DNA transposon is directly linked to pigmentation. One highly inbred line of these fish was shown to have a variety of pigmentation patterns. In the members of this line in which the Tol2 transposon hopped out "cleanly" (i.e., without removing other parts of the genomic sequence), the fish were albino. But when Tol2 did not cleanly hop from the regulatory region, the result was a wide range of heritable pigmentation patterns (Koga et al., 2006).
The fact that transposable elements do not always excise perfectly and can take genomic sequences along for the ride has also resulted in a phenomenon scientists call exon shuffling. Exon shuffling results in the juxtaposition of two previously unrelated exons, usually by transposition, thereby potentially creating novel gene products (Moran et al., 1999).

The ability of transposons to increase genetic diversity, together with the ability of the genome to inhibit most TE activity, results in a balance that makes transposable elements an important part of evolution and gene regulation in all organisms that carry these sequences."

We also know that life arose from the adaptive landscape. It is an interesting boundary, or continuum.

Should also have explicitly said there's not a single genome to find its way around the valley. You get whatever you get when some part of the population's gene pool makes it over there. — Srap Tasmaner

Yeah, that's precisely the idea Srap Trasmaner. The latency in the DNA you speak of also enables further penetration along the ridge. It's a good point.


I understand what you mean. The adaptive landscape is itself changing through time, throwing up troughs and waves. Evolution tries to run the rise of waves. Because we can think of life as starting at Point A, we can see that it is an expanding sphere. An expanding sphere is constantly expanding its Surface Area as it expands radially. New combination of genotypes come into existence to cross the new expanse.

And while there is divergent evolution, there is also convergent and so we get rift lines between adjacent species as well, but like a maze we could trace this back radially toward the center, through our tree of life to find the junction. These rift lines can merge into one species, because there is only ultimately one organism, however, as this article points out, it is unlikely.

I think the adaptive landscape is an interesting interface too. It's spongy. When we think that there are carnivores feeding on herbivoures feeding on plants, or ants feeding on moss etc, we can see that life is not only riding the adaptive landscape, it is part of the adaptive landscape. Thus at the interface of life, the surface of the expanding sphere there are layers - heirachy.

As a seed for thought, if we were to fix our camera in cross section through the adaptive landscape as it moves upward through time, watching different layers of the heirachy expand and contract as waves and troughs form, it looks an awful lot like a quantum vacuum.

It has done this by filling out every possible combination that allowed it to occur.

I should elaborate on the population a bit more for you. Every variant in the population is either more suited or less suited to its environment or has not net change. If it is a positive or neutral variant, it moves one step closer to becoming the kangaroo or wombat, and exists in tandem with the possum. if it is not, it has entered the valley and will not survive.

Through this consecutive action through time we can step our way carefully toward being a kangaroo. We can claim to have walked along a ridgeline, skirting the valley, in order to arrive safely at our destination. This is genetic drift. The genome has drifted slowly toward the kangaroo, wombat etc all at the same time.

Yes, that would be on the time axis expanding radially from a center of life billions of years back in time, emerging like an expanding sphere.

To understand the adaptive landscape we need to stop thinking about individual organisms and start considering entire populations. A possum, in order, to become a kangaroo would need to undergo several hundred or thousand mutations. This would require that every mutation was either positive or neutral. There could be no negative mutations, as this would wipe out the organism.

The key is to understand the variability in the population. The Genetic Drift can now occur, with mutations being wiped out but successul combinations surviving. In this way the seemingly impossible divide between the possum and the kangaroo can be bridged.

When we consider that a series of mutations has occurred to create the kangaroo, we must also remember that the kangaroo is now a different species. Life on this earth is a colllection of species, and thus the genetic map that is overlaid on the adaptive landscape can be thought of as continuous, just as it is continuous for the kangaroo and possum.

We should also consider that the adaptive landscape changes over time. It rises up and collapses again. So where before there may have been a bridge that allowed the possum to slowly evolve to the kangaroo, that bridge has now probably collapsed.

Do you want me to go on or am I confusing you to much?

Good to know, I might have some Bergson questions for you later. :)

I think the human like robot era's coming Rich. It's just code. Layer upon layer, subroutine upon subroutine. Trial and error.

Be that as it may, becoming fully and truly creative in your life brings meaning and joy so wishing you much luck and happiness on your journey. — Rich

It sounds like you're saying goodbye or marking a milestone. You going away for a while?

Hi Rich, I do understand what you mean, moreso since we started talking. I'm watching Sheldrake now and will try and get into Bergson after that. I like the concept of the morphic field that Sheldrake's espousing, although I wonder about the experiments he cites.

There is a mass movement to turn robots into humans too, so maybe they'll meet in the middle somewhere. Bionically limbed, digitally minded, arguing between the two who is the more real.

Life is the immanence expanding through the changing material landscape, causing life to flash on and off like blinking Christmas lights.

It's still eminence though through time. The expanding sphere. Where's the immanence?

Oh, I see, the evolutionary tree, whose flashing tips are the current points on the genotype network.

Oh, do you mean differentiated in the meaning of differential equation? New level that underpins the genotype network?

I can see the checkerboard of lights in the network lighting up and switching off as the adaptive space is traversed. How do we go from central emanation to central immanence though? (I'm not very well acquainted with Bergson except for 3min of a Livebox Recording that put me to sleep, and a critique on the holographic mind). I'll have to check it out.

Thanks anonymous66, I'll look him up. He might have YouTube stuff.

No, I think you've missed the trick there Metaphysician. If we extrapolate the inteference from the paper, there are not billions and billions of different lifeforms on earth, there is only one organism covering the adaptive landscape like a mat. It slides through the valleys and around the edges all at once. And when it goes into the valley it is wiped out and when it goes around the valley it survives.
But there is only one living creature. Species are only several steps of genetic diversity away from each other. We differentiate one species from the next because they can't mate. That's it. But that just reflects their distance from each other in the nodal network. They are all the same.
Wow. This is huge.

Wow, that's it. You've advanced my thinking on the matter by quite a few steps. Thank you.

Splintering tangentially now from this idea though is the idea of sentience. That there is an overarching sentience driving evolution. For a while I have conflated the two, but they are clearly different ideas (Rich, if you are reading, I have started watching your morphic fields video, which I must admit is interesting). In a sentient model of evolution the tree adapts to its environment through the genome because it is aware of the environment. They are not random mutations. The tree knows roughly which areas of the genome to punch until it gets the result it wants. So for example we would expect a loosening of constraint around root growth and style in a new dry environment.

To prove this postulate, you could see if indeed mutations were higher in these regions, but it would not definitively establish intentionality. That is what we need to prove. I was working on this idea in another post but someone decided they wanted to grandstand and has trashed the OP for now. (If we could figure out how to establish intentionality in anything in science, we could apply it to other areas as well such as establishing that the universe was intentionally created.)

The question becomes how can we demonstrating that the changes in the plant were intentional. One way to reason might be that the environment influences the higher order features of the plant during is life - such as geotropism, so why not also affect aspects of the germ line during the lifetime. That the germ line could be affected by experiences was first proposed by Lemarck a couple of hundred years ago and has no support.

Another way might be to test the ratio of actual successful adaptive mutations against predicted successful mutations. If mutations really were random we would expect a staggeringly high number that would be fatal to the plant - reducing its chance of survival.

The idea that was put forward by the trasher of the OP suggested initially was that we need to invoke the environment in a closed loop with the plant. I am still working through this idea as well, I haven't considered it in any real depth yet.

So how does creative evolution handle a case like this? — Srap Tasmaner

Hi Srap, that is what I am trying to figure out. That something other than blind dumb luck allows evolution to continue to progress through time, I have little doubt of. What to prove and how to prove is what I'm wrestling with. Maybe you can help.

The first method, the one I alluded to earlier was about proving creativity. That living organisms love to throw out a wealth of variants, just for the hell of it. To be expressive. I thought we might be able to test this idea using divergent evolution. In Australia, after its geographical isolation the possum was king. It had no predators. Therefore without a driver to change - it could reproduce successfully as a species ad infinitum.

In the normal model of evolution I would therefore expect the genome to become very conserved. It would not want to mess up a winning survival combination. If creativity was the driver here I would expect the allele (variant genes that code for the same thing, eg blue eyes, brown eyes, green eyes) number in the population would rise rapidly. There should be a stark contrast.

The drawback with this though, as I now see it, is that there is no driver for constraint either in traditional evolutionary models. If every variant is also able to reproduce successfully then divergent evolution will occur. The test hits a speed hump. I haven't yet tried to resolve this.

One thing that springs to mind though is to invoke a valley between two hills. On one hill is the possum and on the other the kangaroo it will change into. The problem is that in order to reach the kangaroo morphology it must pass through the valley - which is a valley of all the less desirable traits that must occur for a possum to become a kangaroo.

Yes, you are right. I should have been clearer and will attempt to be clearer in the future. Thanks for your input.

StreetlightX,

Nothing of what I have written or cited has anything to do with psychology. The field drawn upon is dynamic systems theory, which is indeed worth a look at if you're interested in these questions. — StreetlightX

As it stands, it seems entirely obvious that you've not done even the most cursory of research. Not with entirely uninformed statements like this, which is what I was objecting to: — StreetlightX

Let me start by saying that Dynamic Systems Theory is at the heart of developmental psychology. Perhaps the cursory examinations of the facts you suggest I undertake should be undertaken first by yourself, so that you are not the one found to be making the uninformed statements you object to so much, especially if you intend to try and wield them like a weapon against somebody.

I have also explained to you on at least three separate occasions now that the intent of the op is to discuss the lack of intentionality when dealing with subjects such as the universe or evolution. Perhaps my initial premise was vague on that point, but that you fail to grasp this point after being told so repeatedly is a little tedious.

I do not have the luxury of spending hour upon hour researching in fine detail all the current thinkers of our modern and ancient times. I learn through the active exchange of ideas and I enjoy that. If you can best me in argument I take my hat off to you and I concede it, like I have on this site many times.

You are right that the article header is provocative, and it is intended to be so. I wanted to challenge assumptions and I wanted disagreement. I will always try to take the most extreme position that I think I can justify and let people try and attack it. I want them to attack it, and by doing so to challenge my own thinking so I can find the flaws in my logic. I hope that in doing so I may also challenge the thinking of others, and together we all grow in the understanding of a fundamental truth, whatever that may be.

That pyschology is also considered a science did escape me on this occasion and you had every right to bring it up with me in relation to the OP. I did admit immediately you had made a good point and my definition of science was too loose. You then went on to try and debate me using that same pyschology I just admitted I hadn't considered and for every effort you made I think I did an adequate job of finding a logic that still supported the position of the OP nonetheless. I enjoyed our first two exchanges and it gave some perspective on how I might tackle the idea of intentionality with ideas like God or evolution when viewing through the eyes of science.

Unfortunately StreetlightX you whine. And your whining only got louder the more your logic began to fail you. Rather than debating the ideas with me, which I was enjoying, you chose to name call. It is like setting up a debate entitled "God is real" and you standing up as first speaker with the argument "No, he's not. You're a liar. Do your research."

If you are not happy with the premise of my OP, then by all means say so, once. If you are still not happy, do not try and wreck my OP by bursting into insult. Go to the moderator and make your case. If the moderator so suggests I will make any ammendment they ask. The other option is, you can simply bugger off.

Hi StreetlightX, thanks for your response. I will respond at leisure more tomorrow, for now though it is early morning and I just popped in to see if there were any other comments.

There is just one little irony I will point out for now, when you say "study the things you're attempting to talk about," and then say "The scientific study of intention is far richer [sic] than what is presented here" you might want to take a leaf from your own book.

My contention is that a lack of applied 'intention' to the problems of physics such as the universe and evolution is stopping them from understanding a deeper truth. The OP actually asks for ideas on how we might approach it, which you have provided. I didn't say that psychology doesn't study intentionality. I admire your passion, but take off your psyche goggles.

Another good answer. I was talking about the universe and evolution, which does not permit sentience into its framework of thinking and you're talking about the actual crime, through the eyes of psychology, the study of whatever the hell sentience and consciousness might be. You've taken a very strong position on the high ground behind me. I opened the can, so let's see what's inside.

The baker and the butcher are both contextualised inside a larger constraint of the environment, wherein the actions of the butcher can be observed and understood. The action of the baker caused the butcher to pick up the gun and shoot him.

The author attempts to equate intentionality to deterministic logic in order to explain the actions of the baker. They do this by suggesting environmental constraint is causing the action rather than an innate process arising instrinsically from within the butcher (it's just a loop).

In this sense intentionality is nothing more than causality, and is devoid of sentient action.

Using this logic in a court of law, the butcher would be no more responsible for the shooting of the baker than the baker is. He is a victim of circumstance.

Yeah, that one snuck up on me. I was down the other end of the pool.

Would not, could not, should not, did not. I'll grant that psychology likes to jump into that stuff, just like philosophers do. So in that regard my definition of science may be a little loose. I'm talking about the harder sciences. Good point though. Continue to hammer away Blue Banana.

This is a good quote StreetlightX. It's good to see that science is trying to address there shortfalls. However, saying that the action arose in the mind and commanded lower processes to perform the action only demonstrates that the behaviour of shooting the gun was traced back through the nerve impulses to the brain or the mind. It doesn't suggest that the intent was to shoot the baker.

The difference would be that science could never link a deliberate intent between the firing of the bullet and the death of the baker. Scientific approach would say it was a coincidence- just like it says about mutant genes causing evolution, or the relationships between trees and insects etc. The lack of understanding of intentionality is blinding scientists to the real truth and limiting their capacity. I'm trying to help science here. :)

In Japan, the Shinto's tie little tags around rocks and trees and put them near rivers- in the middle of nowhere I may add, and on those tags is written the one word 'God'.

Panpsychism is the best theory for the emergence of not just intelligence, but life itself. Everything would make so much more sense if only there wasn't life doing cartwheels across the front of the lecture theatre.

How to understand the emergence of consciousness is just by understanding emergent order through heirachy (thanks Apokrisis). A rock may not have the same type of sentience a living creature has, but that's just a reflection of the type of society the atoms have built. The atoms themselves are teaming with life.

I think the key to proving the equality of the theories of sentience and god etc may be through the scrutiny of science itself, and looking for incongruities in in methodology.

What comes immediately to mind is abstract reasoning. Science uses abstract reasoning to suggest A came from B. By itself though, even if repeatedly verifiable, it does not prove in every instance that A came from B. It can only prove it happens in the tests, and then generalise the findings.

Furthermore saying that A came from B does not explain C, which happened shortly after B happened. Another series of tests can show that C can emerge if B happens. Together, using abstract reasoning and testing, scientists compile the crime scene (I can't but help feel that I've heard this before). They put all the pieces together, but then refuse to allow abstract reasoning to tie it together with the man that entered the room.

They do not allow abstract reasoning to tie it all together because they do not have a man that fits the bill who can walk into the room and begin the cascade of events to create the crime scene. They do not have a God to test against.

This lack of items by which they can conduct tests is a weakness in science, and prohibts the abstract reasoning they use to get as far as they do from taking the next most obvious unifying step. They close their eyes and say case closed, I understand how all the pieces fell over except the first one, and that's good enough.

Just look at the complexity and inter-relationships in science, how widely they are understood and how dogedly scientists refuse to look up and see the picture.

I just watched Star Wars: Rogue One and jotted down this short dialogue:
[Saw] You can stand to see the imperial flag reign across the galaxy?
[Jyn] It's not a problem if you don't look up.

I thought that was good. Hurry up and comment, before this become my personal journal.

Science could explain how the universe started by outlining all the conditions that would be required at the start and then working systematically forward to the conception of life or earth or whatever goal they have in mind. The problem with this theory though, is they are playing the part of God, by setting the conditions and then triggering the cascade, even if only in theory.

We can deduce that all models on the formation the universe are not scientically sound if they do not include a reference to God, as the model itself was created by somebody.

To more deeply understand the complexity of the problem, and suggest why explanations are akin to explaining google maps to infants, let's re-examine the statement, "I didn't do it, it just fell."

The child has a very defensible position. We could argue that there was no reason for it to fall and that it hadn't fallen before and that cups don't just fall. Nonetheless, nobody can argue with the fact that the cup has fallen.

In fact anyone could examine the spill of milk on the ground and prove that indeed the milk has spilt from the cup because the cup tipped over, without needing to invoke a knock to explain it all. In fact you could probably explain the state of the milk in the cup up to a nanosecond before it was knocked over.

Still, if pushed on the need for a knock, the child may say that there was no need for a knock because by looking at the fracture of the crack in the cup, science tell us it fell from the table, there was no mysterious knock of the cup, it was gravity. Why suggest the cup was knocked when clearly gravity pulled the cup down. And we could regress backward like this, never proving intentionality.

Yet, the parent knows the child knocked the cup over. None of the evidence offered refutes the knocking over of the cup, only that to explain the spilling of the milk and the falling of the cup, a knock is not required. The child or scientists will then admit there are limits to current knowledge beyond a certain point, for the moment. Clearly even when the next layers are revealed, a knock will not cause the cup to fall.

We could also, as parents, argue that in our experience cups don't fall and that we have knocked cups over before and this is what happens. We could repeat this experiment and demonstrate. This would constitute verifiable evidence and may satisfy many scientists and children alike. Unfortunately, it doesn't actually prove that what happened in this very specific occasion of the spilt milk is what we showed in our experiments. Maybe it was something else.

The other problem in the main though is in the case of the universe and sentience we can't create verifiable experiments. We don't actually know ourselves.

Nonetheless we can look at the entire scene, place the child in the scene and understand that child knocked the cup over. Information about the milk or the cup provides no more evidence.

In a way we can do this because we understand the mind of the child, rather than looking from the outside. This is similar to something I started watching on Bergson. Maybe a solution lies in there somewhere.

Here is some of the text from one of the articles concerning the chemicals the plants release. It reinforces the question of whether evolution is creative or simply accidental mutations.

"Selective deterrents
The repellent chemicals are specific to the ants. In fact, they attract and repel different groups of insects.
"[The chemicals] don't repel bees, even though they are quite closely related to ants. And in some cases, the chemicals actually seem to attract the bees," says Dr Raine.
The researchers think that some of the repellents that acacias produce are chemical "mimics" of signalling pheromones that the ants use to communicate.
"We put flowers into syringes and puffed the scent over the ant to see how they would respond, and they became quite agitated and aggressive" he explained.
"The ants use a pheromone to signal danger; if they're being attacked by a bird they will release that chemical that will quickly tell the other ants to retreat."
Dr Raine says this clever evolutionary system shows how the ants and their plants have evolved to protect, control and manipulate each other.
The ants may be quick to swarm, bite and sting, but the harmless-looking acacias have remained one step ahead."

This in reference to the previous statement:

I just watched an interesting interview with Feinmann on the question 'why'. He said he could not answer sufficiently when asked why a magnet is attracted to a fridge. Anyway.

Take the ant on the acacia that feeds on the sugar that the acacia provides for it.

A random mutation in a segment of the DNA responsible for producing or transporting sugar occurs, causing sugar to pop out through the phloem onto the surface of the tree - ie the tree is bleeding sugar. It is very lucky at this point the plant, with such a hideous disease does not starve to death or get eaten by some huge carnivore.

A passing ant sees the sugar, says yum, and starts to eat it. It comes back every day to the still uneaten tree, eventually deciding to set up shop in the bark of the tree. Along comes a pollinator to the tree and the ants naturally scare it away, just like they scare away the other herbivores that have come to eat the tree... oh wait there a sec. No I forgot something.

A second random mutation occurs causing the plant to produce a noxious smell to insects- no, wait, bees are insects. Let me try again. A second random mutation occurs to the plant, causing it to produce a noxious smell to ants, but only noxious to ants, not to pollinating bees. This has the coincidentally lucky effect of ensuring the ants don't chase away the bees when they come to pollinate.

Oh, hang on. Let me just tweak that mutation a little bit, as I just realised that if the plant is producing a chemical noxious to ants they would not stay in plant. Let me try again. A random mutation occurs causing an aromatic to be produced (not deleted). The aromatic is only expressed in the flowering part of the plant and not elsewhere, at times when pollination is required.

The aromatic was a very lucky unwanted copying error of the DNA, especially when we consider that without it, the plant should have died in the first generation of ant settlers. - the mutations must have occurred within the one plant within the one generation.

So the plant now has successfully produced - sorry wrong wording - the plant has now accidentally produced two freak mutations (which should be catastrophic to the plant), one to do with expressing sugar on its surface in nice bitesize portions, the other with producing an aromatic - so a minimum of two highly dangerous mutations, both of which fit perfectly in with the environment. — MikeL