Read your essay, interesting, hopefully I'm not gagging you with banal analysis, but thought it could be a good discussion. Not that schooled in politics myself, but I got something out of it. I think you highlight important motive forces that are diminishing and sometimes completely lacking in our society, namely proactive individuality, experimentation, and institutions that are neither synergistic nor antagonistic but exist in parallel, in essence non-competitive.

Individuals don't spontaneously commit to a novel interest unless channeled into it by market dynamics, pre-packaged informational sourcing and predictive authority. We don't seem to have entrepreneurship that is scientific enough to innovate a new, non-degenerative and non-corrupting institutional template rather than simply new products. And all of our institutions are in a state of financial tension, where any benefit in one area always results in detriment somewhere else, a situation that perpetually coerces society into some form of antagonism via competition.

We spend too much effort inventing products by the millions while neglecting the equally important pursuit of experimenting with various kinds of collectivity. Instead of solely implementing organizational strategies imposed authoritatively from the top of a social hierarchy, fomenting class distinction and power struggle, we could be making a wide assortment of parallel movements, speculating communes that don't get immediately choked out of existence by rivalry and acquisitive consolidation.

One country having multiple governments, a precedential one and also subsidiary experimental ones for assessing vastly different possible structures, is a good idea. But the psychological issues you must have dealt with elsewhere are a major obstacle. Once the global scale is reached, we have to choose a scientific division of social labor or eternal imperialism, and the imperialist approach is extremely appealing to the human psyche. Maybe this is a pivotal era in human history that will result in long-standing commitment to either collaboration or oppression, reason or force.

Are you... a cow? A very intelligent one? (-:

I moove towards wherever reason leads me. It is constitutive of my moomanity. lol

I'm not actually a strict veggie guy, but I would convert completely if I could get nutritional equivalence. Killing animals and raising them in squalor causes cognitive suffering and physical pain, and is easy to comprehend as less than the ideal situation, for human health and economy also. I think we can claim that diets of mass-produced meat have universal problems, but any solution could be culturally and logistically complex, why I say its not simply an issue of whether animals are aware of their dire condition. I wouldn't trade the lives of starving or malnourished humans for the well-being of a different species, but we're causing ourselves more troubles with meat than we're probably preventing. Maybe we should work at phasing out products that are detrimental to animals, but still have some mostly recreational animal farming. Is that even possible?



Some humans could probably learn from fish love.

Yeah, but I have this excellent Moroccan recipe for goat or lamb....

All that really sustains a large-scale meat industry is probably the expanding range of specialty seasonings in yuppy recipes along with disposable traditions and simple habit. Meat is unhealthier to eat than agricultural products, the quality and taste of most modern meat isn't that great, raising livestock is bad for the environment and more labor than growing crops, and most of our crops are used to feed livestock, so might as well be feeding humans. If we fully transitioned to agriculture and gardening, independent farmers wouldn't be driven out of business by their increasingly unprofitable market for meat products/livestock feed. At our economic stage, you've got to consider certain logistics though, like the cruciality of constant pesticide innovations to the agricultural food supply and climate fluctuations.

What I think we really should do is fully transition to solar power and use the surplus energy to grow our own gardens in residential greenhouses. If we can breed plants to span the entire nutritional spectrum, its very feasible. Creates lots of jobs as well. I think butchering meat might desensitize people to violence, possibly detrimental to human ethics, but surely less people would adopt that practice to begin with.

I also can easily get in touch with my inner barbarian. Some people find certain meats repulsive, but I don't have that reaction at all. At the same time, I think it would be great if society could transition to a fully agriculture-based diet and let all animals live their natural lives, which seem more worthy of respect the more you consider it, especially if we can replace the nutritional contribution of meat with plants.

We would generally call more non-rational animals more non-thinking animals and regard these organisms as suffering less, but I think this is a cognitive bias based on suspect analogy to our own minds. If an organism has nerve endings, we probably shouldn't harm it if at all possible, really being honest with ourselves, and if it appears to experience social meaning, even moreso. Maybe humans would generally become more ethical in all situations if we didn't constantly harm animals.

"Instinct" has a somewhat pejorative connotation, as if the organism doesn't have conscious control, but this seems more unrealistic with every advancement in biology. I think we should view all animals with a nervous system as having some kind of cognitive ability. The implications for ethics and practices are a related but different issue.

If a fish is making decisions based on perceptions of cause and effect, I think this qualifies as some kind of rationality. Maybe not Kantian, but perhaps a marine biologist could, with some detailed investigation and analysis, outline the conditions of the possibility of Cichlidian experience, a set of approximately rational parameters in fish mentality. If fish are romantic, a conscious flexibility surpassing simple stimulus and response certainly exists. Humans and fish display different kinds of instincts, and it is not necessarily the case that fish instinct is strictly automated while human instinct is not, so why not varieties of reason infused with social meanings? We incline to label nature from our own frame of reference, but perhaps fish also experience love, and wouldn't that be worthy of moral respect, or even moral duty?

I apologize for the interjection, but maybe you et al who have a good grasp of economics can help me understand something. Where is all this money that is being made by multibillionaires going? I imagine much of it is being hoarded - problematic, and some of it is being invested - constructive, but do financial mechanisms necessitate that most of the money be hoarded for investment to even be possible? Could restructuring or reinventing the investment process be a means of making capitalism more equitable in its distribution of influence, without necessitating political or ideological upheaval? If a dozen billionaires invest some fractions of their wealth to speculate in the most profitable markets, that is a tolerable risk, but a billion citizens investing a hundred dollars each every decade is an equally powerful mechanism if it could be coordinated towards specific goals, like funding cancer research or clean energy technology for instance. Maybe investment could be orchestrated in a way that does not even require monetary profit. This idea is based on a book written recently by an economist.

Cultural and sub-cultural divergent evolution happens unconsciously and rapidly, almost to the point of creating totally discrepant worlds, so dealing with that issue is paramount if we want a multiculturally stable society.

A multi-branched government distributes authority so that single organizations cannot achieve the absolute control that tends towards corruption, but this is being usurped in the U.S. by a system of non-transparent departments.

Representation allows citizens to have some control of policy-making by influence on the professional fate of government officials, but participation is inadequate, and exorbitantly costly campaign funding means that candidates for the most prestigious offices are always extremely rich, thus not dependent on a particular constituency of typical citizens for their livelihoods or cultural security, though this could easily change with activism.

Media is creating a confused chaos of information from such a plethora of covert agendas that most citizens imbibe facts and beliefs with no real cognizance of whether they are true, valid or justifiable.

In the U.S., the economy is becoming gradually more oppressive and job markets more unreliable, so that the attention of citizens is completely absorbed in merely protecting themselves and their families from poverty.

Like you said, larger populations are more impersonal, with a strong sense of community lacking in nearly every neighborhood.

These are some of the divisive sociological dynamics, the extremely obvious ones, not even touching upon the more psychological factors. All these problems are in principle easy enough to solve. All that is required is deliberate organizing efforts, a simple enough source of purpose and meaning for the modern world. The psychological barriers are probably much more difficult to handle. I wish I had the knowledge, competency, and especially the resources to find solutions, but no one in actuality cares much what I think anyway I would imagine lol Interesting to think about though.

One of the most pernicious techniques of social control is manipulating relationships, mentalities and general behavior with pain. Pain can change a worldview, it can efface humanity, it can make humans submit to abuse and even complete irrationality. Everyone dislikes this socially induced pain so much that we seem to be somewhat compulsively moving towards institutions of desensitization, but this tampers with the cognitive contribution to motivation so much that many become nihilistic and hardened until unresponsive to even serious practical concerns. If we lose our conceptually emotional commitment to cultural prospects, innovative idealism evaporates and then our constructive pragmatism also.

I think social engineering is to some degree reinforcing an unconsciously limiting "maintain/fight/panic/spontaneously combust" mindset, and that's why we're regressing on issues of conscience. Abuse is phasing citizens less and less, and we discharge affect in ways that do not align with a desire for progressiveness in belief systems. Reformist movements don't usually happen anymore. Maybe naturally empathetic demographics still exist somewhere, but I haven't experienced this in many years.

And jail is atrocious, the penal system should be reformed. It would be a great deterrent if culture didn't force citizens into it regardless.

I've probably got some unique insights in this area from being psychologically tortured during an unjust jailing for many months with a high level of isolation, and I wasn't in very good condition to begin with. It could always be worse. At least I've got my mind. I've got nothing to do but survive and nurture my sanity, so no peripheral pressure. You're a lot less likely to explode or implode if you've got company, but my mood still hasn't recovered and its been almost two years. Even if you're a person that tends towards optimism, the unrelenting stress changes the chemistry of your brain and your whole sense of reality begins to warp. Many Americans don't even know what constantly perceiving immediate, imminent danger is like. I'd agree that most first-world citizens are happier than they think they are, at least their brains aren't being rotted. We usually take that for granted. Without some ideally timed interventions, I probably would've been destroyed.

Complex language is what sets us apart from other animals...Language must have been instrumental in our evolutionary and later cultural development.

Language probably hasn't greatly changed the core of the hominin technology-producing thought process, very much based on reasoning and causal recognitions of a non-verbal variety. I think the essentials of Kantian reason would apply similarly to earlier hominins, maybe even Austrolepithecus also. A modern human ferally raised by Homo habilis wouldn't be inevitably prone to display massively divergent cognition, single-handedly leading hominins in a technological revolution to the next stage of evolution for instance lol Its a hundred thousand year history of cumulative education as a culture of behavioral demonstration and rehearsal that has made our thinking vastly more developed technically, with language being a relatively minor component of this process until the historical period, and still more of an instrument than the decisive factor.

My Freudian-inspired theory is that what complex language exclusively contributed to evolution was giving humans cultural permission to think and feel in novel ways, a normative tolerance for sharing obscure experiences mimetically and conceptually, with our own self as well, rather than the mere biological norms rooted in reproduction, survival, and related status, which non-human anthropoids are much more constrained by.

Language does not guarantee greater intelligence in all possible ways, which makes simple intuitive sense if you really give it some thought. Orangutans can even best humans at a touch screen game that is based on the rudiments of our own visual recognition ability. Human cognition isn't universally superior, but the human psyche with its motivational properties is much more intricate than probably any species because, for hundreds of thousands of years, language has given it a medium to assert itself without getting brute negative feedback. This makes humans extremely diverse, interesting, difficult, and somewhat crazy.

That's my opinion, it could be inaccurate.

I seem to recall Kant not claiming that morality is essentially rooted in the rational premises he called maxims, but rather is as metaphysically indeterminate as noumena. Maybe I was reading this into what he wrote, though I got the impression that the moral sensibility not only transcends reason in his view but also the total individual, and the pure reason you mentioned, causal structure inherent in particular phenomena, becomes practical reason as the universal moral sensibility guides human behavior, with humans accessing this universality with a sort of personal leap of faith. Commitment to individuality inherently produces a rational cogency. This is not what we technically refer to as the pragmatist movement, but it has the spirit of pragmatism by providing for citizens to naturally intuit that it will simply work, as an aspect of what it means to be human, and the presumably minor deviations attributable to temperament and circumstance are corralled by a practical duty that cannot be reasonably denied.



Without Kant's emphasis on the respectability of duty, what we could call integrity, his alleged universal laws aren't actually universalizable, and as you say, commonly subject to degeneration depending on social context. I think he may have the nature of core moral ideals honed to conceptual perfection, a firm foundation of basics that rationalizes the modern outcome of cultural history in a broadly accessible way if you can stand direct contact with his frustrating prose, probably preferable to assimilate by brief summary unless you want a chore. Infusing the categorical imperative into real world situations is a lot more complicated than being true to your human self, but its a viable place to start.


If you guys disagree somehow, bring it on!

Not as idealistic as Kant, didn't "write it on the tablet of my heart", as the Bible says. lol But we can discuss it, I'll come back to you guys with somethin'. Anyone else who's got some moral ideations, go ahead!

I'm referring to the categorical imperative, if we can will an act with import for the well-being of the community to be a universal law, then it is moral and we have a duty to abide by it, and are actually worthy of more respect the harder it is for us to abide by it. "Everyone must like koalas", not significant enough to be of moral relevance. "Everyone must work at least forty hours a week", not realistic, necessary or logistically sensible. "Thou shalt not kill" wouldn't please every human all the time, and this is attributable to a huge range of causes, natural temperament, situational pressures, but if we all conformed to the directive, no war, no military spending, no risk or fear of violence, it would make the world a universally better place. Its not a natural law, but it would work so well that we can regard it as a fundamental moral precept to be upheld however possible, a valid human ideal at the very least. According to Kant, the "conditions of the possibility of experience" in the context of human values transcend pure reason's scope, not intrinsically formative to all human knowing like the experience of spatial structure for instance, but reasoning can arrive at some universalizable principles by considering practical consequences.

I am of the opinion, if people didn't have something to struggle for we would lose the will to live. We have to have aspirations. I think one of the greatest challenges facing mankind would be boredom and loneliness and general nihilism.

Everyone certainly needs challenges and stimulation, but as far as social engineering, I think its a big misconception that struggle somehow facilitates cognitive growth or any evolutionary process in general. Its favorable conditions that foster the persistence of new mutations and diversification of niches. Resistance and harsh environments ossify evolving forms into a few rigid, unalterable types, if survival is possible at all. Think of how many more species live in the Amazon rainforest compared to the Arctic. Life, including the human mind, can create, differentiate and select itself in such a huge, complex variety of ways that forcibly imposing a particular scheme of concepts and value judgements is completely inadequate to theorize let alone successfully plan human evolution. Prolonged obligation to contend with a non-negotiable set of ideas produces neurotic fixations and degrades rationality. We've probably made a miniscule fraction of the advancement civilization was truly capable of.

I think it would be great if we could make human culture the Amazon rainforest of altruism, but so many huge psychological and institutional barriers. That's not to say moderate stress can't shock the human system out of ennui, but the duress itself is not conducive to enhancement of thought and behavior. Antagonism is an inhibitor, its the possibility of real security between the inevitable periods of what needs to be temporary, non-threatening, relationally non-destructive conflict that produces personal and social progress. But self-defense as preemptive, conspiratorial sabotage might always be a popular choice. The perception of possible advantage certainly feels like success.

He has got man breasts.

Since you all undoubtedly want my opinions, I assert that man breasts are neither pragmatic nor ideal.

...moral claims are conceived of as, at best, inherently subjective statements, expressing not an objective property of the world, but the individual's own prejudices. Morality is presented as thereby lacking any objective, public basis.

Values are such a grey area, everyone knows what's morally good, but if it causes you pain or disadvantage, it begins to seem so inadequate, almost like a means to sucker populations into unequal standing. As Enlightenment Kant said, to the extent that our moral judgements are rational, this is "practical reason", a veneer of universal pragmatisms, not even close to satisfying human nature's vast assortment of personal preferences. That's why Kant describes the fundamentals of civic morality as a matter of duty, not pleasure.

Nietzsche, the expert on nihilism, would say that we must give our fingers, toes and nipples a goal. But we seem to have excessively goaled ourselves into utilitarian hell. "I don't have enough money or security to be good" is the common sentiment, most are travailing merely to stay solvent or avoid the very real possibility that their occupational interests will collapse, and too busy covering their vulnerable toosh for reflection and innovative problem-solving. Not that everyone ever would be substantially rational even in ideal conditions, but we can do a lot better than leading lives that generally revolve around all-consuming work, intimidation, self-defense, countermeasures to destroyed reputation, shallow publicity and the coercion of citizens isolated by financial mechanisms.

I didn't realize the arrangements were so collectivist. Was that crop management function along with various spiritual associations the predominant mechanism for rulers' sustained security, as opposed to force? I imagine a lot of variation on that basic theme existed. When did centralized agriculture generally start to break down in antiquity, and was it a result of imperial invasions and conquests followed by slave labor and enforced caste systems?

I'll first say that I agree the evolution of culture was mostly mimetic rather than biological, but mimetic selection exacts changes in the structure of the brain that have had very subtle effects on the innate features of human mental traits in thousands of separate ways throughout the world for tens of thousands of years. This dynamic is currently too complex to be conceptually linked with any specific factor, but human social behavior can affect biology.

Regarding language specifically, you can influence someone without informing them, and this is what I think drove the greater development of distinctly human language as compared to the rest of the anthropoids. I mean you really think we speak for the sake of telling the truth? Language, while not completely disjuncted from practical causality in its meanings, has had an extraordinary amount of aesthetic and status appeal during most of human history and prehistory, with cultural behavior selecting for maximized linguistic ability, and enhanced linguistic ability molding culture into a form that socially selected for even further development, a primarily mimetic evolutionary process with a modicum of biological change thrown in as mostly greater brain plasticity for assimilating and mastering the forms of speech to carry out extremely long and fluent sequences of phonemes, and explicit grammar working its way into the mix somehow. I think human language probably differs from the rest of anthropoid language more than the core thought processes of anthropoid species differ, though humans have a much superior ability to generalize.

Linguistic evolution's non-rational element explains why songbirds such as canaries also have complex grammar and a large repertoire of sounds without even close to the same level of flexible intelligence as anthropoids.



Language as symbolic grasping? You think linguistic meaning is massive neuronal synesthesia with grasping functions? Wild! lol

My amateur opinion is that the thought structures enabling tool use probably support the form of language to some degree as well, but many brain structures involved in producing modern language evolved much later than Homo habilis and are more responsible for aesthetic creation of certain varieties of complex memes than the possibility of civilized technical practices, though technological facility was simultaneously advancing mostly independent of spoken communication. Prehistoric language is much more grammatically sophisticated than the object-oriented languages of contemporary societies, so I think the selection pressure was initially for speech to serve as a kind of pure artistry, similar to our musical or poetic sensibilities. Deeply ingrained in civilized culture as an aspect of human nature, but not a motivational vector leading inevitably to institution-building with its technological foundations. I think maybe population dynamics are what led to large-scale civilization, not linguistic communicativeness. And the memeticizing of quantification in highly innovative ways, a byproduct of inchoate civilization.

Modern language emerged at least two hundred thousand years ago, at the origin of our species. Hunter-gatherer cultures speak with roughly equivalent complexity to civilized cultures. Maybe language platformed the evolution of civilization, one of its necessary preconditions, but language alone does not inevitably lead to institutions.

You mean written language? That's the historical record, a corollary of civilization but not the cause. Source material for the scientific analysis of civilized culture perhaps, basis for our modern knowledge.

Don't kiss me all at once!

...the frogs eye was essentially just part of its brain

Has anyone proposed a biological mechanism for how a function such as vision integrates with the rest of the brain? Many neuroscientists claim that the eye-related brain processes of an organism such as a frog are merely an automatic stimulus/response system, but this is almost ridiculous in the context of common sense observation. The activity of a sense organ such as the eye has got to be a sensory abbreviation for the sake of greater efficiency within very specific conditions, such as the quick reflexes required for predation or some kinds of precarious balancing, not at all a primary cause of motivity or even perception in general.

What is the relationship between incoming and outgoing brain processes, and are all outgoing brain processes what we could regard as "conscious awareness"? If so, any theories of how awareness integrates with the holistic consciousness phenomenon, and what makes awareness graduate to self-awareness?

These inquiries might be unanswerable at this stage of science, but worth some thought at least.

According to Demasio, some of the ancients believed the mind was located in the chest, as the heart. The concept of mind can change. Future research will probably theorize the mind as more than a product of traditional solution chemistry happening on a microscopic scale in neurons.



That's probably accurate, science and philosophy identify our minds as our thinking, and we perceive our thoughts to be occurring in our brains, so we look for mind in the understanding of a particular brain region, but this Early Modern concept is being revolutionized.

...the Enlightenment also has a shadow side. And that is the abandonment of what is generally designated as 'the spiritual'.

I agree that the spiritual aspect of existence is difficult to reconcile with idealized glorifications of supposedly rational thinking, and this daunting challenge has led many to pursue either reason or faith, as if mutually exclusive. I think both spirituality and rationality have always been closely tied to supportive, reliable community, and are equally impossible to sustain long-term without an environment that fosters close social connections. Human beings can unite around any kind of cause imaginable, the possibilities for accomplishment, improvement and combining ideas nearly limitless, so long as we learn to trust, accept, and work towards the experience of genuinely caring for or at least participating with co-citizens. All the Enlightenment ideals we can muster probably aren't going to help the human race if economic and political models, depersonalizing art forms, predatory presentation of fact, and the manufacturing of conflict continue to hinder or even splinter communities, though attempting to instill the basic capacity for rational thought is certainly a piece of the puzzle.

Value systems will need to be changed to encourage frugality, sustainability and re-use instead of flagrant over-consumption and waste. But the materialist culture of capitalism will be completely unable to deal with this, as it challenges its entire raison d'etre.

Maybe one aspect of the problem is that we don't have an adequate accounting of and consideration for human psychology. To profoundly revise the system, we have to motivate citizens, and to revise systems at the rapid paces required by advancing technology, citizens have to self-motivate. Modifying our own psyches, acting in contradiction to conventional compulsions, conditioning, and the expectations of our sub-cultures can be trauma. How do we make the necessary adjustments to intrinsic human psychology without dangerously destabilizing it as commercialist enculturation seems to prove very possible?

Seems that most can project a mindset with amazing facility, in the presence of incredible stresses, but adopting a mindset that critiques and changes itself, negating its own nature for the sake of progressing through a series of increasingly practical outlooks, no matter how simple these outlooks are to conceptualize, is extremely difficult.

But looking at the huge transitions that have occurred in only a single century, substantial progress has got to be possible. I think if we give everyone a decent quality of life that provides opportunities for real peace and leisure, individuals will reflect more, be more flexible, and society won't be so chained to extrinsic incentive. We seem to be going in the opposite direction. Maybe mindfulness practice can lead humans to reflect more on their own behaviors. But abuse and corruption always have the temporary leverage if humans let down their guard and turn inward. The inclination towards social entropy is strong.

Sorry to crash the party, but I've read a couple books recently outlining some facts pertinent to this discussion that you guys will probably find very interesting. Somewhat long-winded and I'm no pro, but I think a few minutes of perusing will be rewarded with snazzy biochemistry knowledge.


Despite the centrality of photosynthesis to the modern biosphere, it has been found that prokaryotic organisms can survive in many climes, wherever energy can be harnessed by chemistry. Competing theories were formulated that considered the possibility of extremophile prokaryotes as the first lifeforms, a likely option considering the possibly turbulent conditions of an earth that, 3.8 billion years ago, was still in volcanic apoplexy. It became common currency that early Earth was profuse in nitrogen and carbon dioxide gas as well as water, with paltry amounts of ammonia and methane, conditions prevailing in the interface between the atmosphere and Earth’s surface, but due to the chaos induced by land birthing tectonic shifts and magma emissions it seemed likely that life would have burgeoned in more stable deep ocean environments, though a viable energy source of course had to be available.

This led scientists to deep sea hydrothermal vents surrounded by teeming populations of single-celled life. Near boiling ocean water heated by the molten mantle beneath earth’s crust froths above fissures that inject hot gas and simple sub-units of macromolecules such as amino acids and other carbon compounds into rock enclosures, eroding microscopic pores into their bulk. Chemicals circulate in and around these tiny chambers that act like nodes between wormlike tunnels connecting this collective chemistry to the outer ocean. It is postulated that dissolved gases such as carbon dioxide, hydrogen and nitrogen, organic molecules, and proton gradients from hydrogen atoms stripped of electrons all subsist in this supercharged environment, a conjunction which provides conditions for a lifelike metabolic cycle without the presence of membranes; networks of linked pores within the rock are the totality of requisite structure, functioning like a congregate of cell walls. Metal ore surfaces exposed within the chambers may catalyze energy transfer, acting the role of primitive enzyme. It is an intriguing model, one that seems to explain what would be bacterial descendants living in droves nearby, and scientists have recently committed to testing it.

An experiment was designed that placed a solid clay brick with microscopic pores and channels in a sealed cylinder of aqueous solution. A tube pumped a heated flow of water through the clay in such a way that circulation was achieved, and further tubes introduced the gases and organic molecules of hydrothermal vents to solution in a concoction that mimicked actual conditions with high fidelity. Scientists planned to set the apparatus in motion and determine whether larger molecules can be formed this way. The effort is ongoing and should disclose much about how life’s metabolism may spontaneously irrupt into existence.

It is not hard to imagine a sort of membranous biofilm adhering to the interior of the rock, becoming gradationally studded with as well as inhabited by amassing macromolecular clusters conjuncted to the nutrient rich external cycle, expanding and budding off living vesicles as the first cellular organisms. Each evolutionary step is improbable on its own, but metabolic self-sufficiency together with mutational self-replication only had to materialize once or rarely, and billions of years of naturalistic trial and error in prokaryotic time is like a macrocosm of the universe.


Quantum mechanics, in particular superposition, has been implicated theoretically in one of its stranger applications, namely to the theory of evolution. It has long been a quandary as to how the extremely improbable leap from inorganic to organic chemistry transpired, especially how the first self-replicating molecules emerged when they cannot even perform any functions at all without the enzymes that simple intuition tells us they must have preceded in time. Looking at the relationship of DNA with the crucial enzymes DNA polymerase and reverse transcriptase, it is hard to see how the vastly complex symbiotic evolution through hundreds if not thousands of more primitive forms could have occurred. We have not recreated it in a lab, as the basic ingredients simply do not yet come close to the refined machinery of actual life in our experiments. The means of evolution have been quite alien to the evidentiary legacy of molecular genetics.

What seemed even hypothetically impossible a few decades ago has become more tenable in the 21st century. Researchers discovered that RNA, single-stranded replicators, are much more prone to mutation than DNA, as RNA polymerase does not proofread its genetic copying, so unprecedented enzymes are constantly being produced by new code in even modern eukaryotic cells, some of which can perform novel functions and change the intracellular metabolism, at least temporarily. RNA’s replicational flexibility shortens the theoretical timeframe necessary for substantial evolutionary transition. Ribozymes have also been observed in the cytoplasm, hybrids of RNA strands and protein chains that catalyze some of their own functions. This could be a descendant molecular species of the missing link: self-directing replicators. It is becoming increasingly convincing to think of the living cell not as a factory or manufacturing plant with a fixed and inextricably interdependent set of mechanical structures, but rather as a dynamic ecosystem in which its elements are semi-autonomous, competing with each other, coalescing into flexible symbiosis, adapting to the general nanoscale environment at a rapid rate.

Even with the viability of a microscopic RNA and ribozyme ecosystem as the breeding ground of what became modern life, the chances of a collection of thousands of different types of symbiotic macromolecules each containing thousands of atoms arising in perfect evolutionary sequence is astronomically small by the standards of Newtonian-influenced conventions in solution chemistry. A degree of functional order on that scale emerging out of a completely inorganic environment would require a much longer duration than the entire 14 billion year history of the universe in the context of thermodynamically-driven diffusion along with energy transfer between particles of a roughly spherical nature and their particle chains and loops, let alone the less than 3 billion year incubation of prokaryotic life. This led scientists to wrack their brains about what could accelerate the rate of evolutionary formation.

The tentative solution, still in its purely theoretical and experimental stages, is the idea that certain protons and electrons in macromolecules can be in superposition with themselves as they undergo some kind of vibrational fluxing within and between atoms, existing as multiple overlapping wave phases modeled according to the Schrodinger equation of quantum physics, meaning that each macromolecule is in hundreds of different configurations at once, greatly reducing the time necessary to achieve a functional, adaptationally effective form. The beginning of the replicator-generating evolutionary process would lack competition, with relatively primitive molecules free to adopt all possible forms instantaneously, until in this blindingly fast metabolic tailoring of the organic to the inorganic surroundings a real replicator or replicator/enzyme hybrid was born.

Expansion and diversification of replicator populations would exert additional forces of natural selection as self-propagation inclined towards greater relative efficiency, causing the replicators' sites of quantum behavior, modellable as superposed wave functions, to collapse into forms providing greater reproductive fidelity, more stable, thermodynamically-driven structures adapted for the inheritance of enduring traits, though the pragmatisms of faster reaction rate, magnified biochemical triggering and more complete energy transfer must have kept quantum effects from becoming entirely vestigialized, a total decoherence. Though heredity has not yet been created from non-life in the lab, it may be the fastest and most inevitable step in evolutionary history, capable of happening in myriad ways. Quantum mechanics makes it almost assured that we will someday evolve nascent life out of inorganic chemistry by artificial means, perhaps very soon.


Snazzy factoids, wouldn't you agree?

We have models of how qualia are stimulated by sensory organs and associated with some neuronal complexes, and we can correlate electrode activation of very specific brain regions to qualia with a lot of trial and error, but the spontaneous manifestation of qualia apart from these contexts has not been described. In general, explanations for qualia are mostly lacking. It seems to me that an entirely new set of physical processes in the brain and the environment must be identified to address qualia. If mechanisms differing from thermodynamic biochemistry, such as quantum effects, were located, color or perhaps any qualitative phenomenon could become more modellable.

We might be able to correlate color itself with a particular complex of molecules, perhaps together with a total revision in our comprehension of what molecules are, figuring out how matter subsists in higher dimensions than space-time, which would be heavily dependent on the mathematics of quantum physics, applying our equations to the invention of instruments that measure naturally occurring retroactive causality of photons etc., near instantaneous tunneling of particles, and coherence.

An entirely new vocabulary would enter common usage for reference to these novel conceptual intuitions of how mind and matter work. Qualia would still be ineffable in a sense because the verbiage is not identical to the experience itself, but from the standpoint of theory, we might arrive at a full explanation, where no phenomenon of qualia remains mysterious. Of course our enhanced observations and theoretical accounts could conceivably lead to further degrees of unintuitive causality that are presently not even imaginable.

At least that's how it appears to me.

I mean that we cannot introspect much about the way our senses work just from the way they feel to us. They may feel like something immediate and intimately familiar, but in reality there is a lot of brain activity involved in producing that sensation, and that activity is itself is quite opaque to introspection. Being the subjects of perception doesn't give us all that much privileged knowledge about the nature of perception.

Neuroscience shows that initial steps in the process of sensing occur beyond our awareness. But I think a disjunct probably exists between qualia and sensing that makes these almost incomparable domains. Qualia are the components of consciousness, while sensing consists of naturally selected unconscious relationships between bodies and features of ecosystems, and interfacing of these domains is more conditional function than representation, a biological abbreviation making a narrow array of particularly key behaviors, reflexes for instance, more efficient. Neuroscience can generate facts about sensing that are inaccessible to naked introspection, and introspection can elucidate consciousness in ways that material science alone is incapable of. Introspection can be more perceptive as a purposeful integration of and experimentation with qualia than our senses. Actually, even science seems to essentially be a method for proving introspections by collective analysis. I'm curious how you would combine this with the common idea that introspection is illusory.

Which aspect of what I said made the least sense to you? lol

When I said the mechanisms of quantum behavior are mysterious, I meant as they occur in natural environments, not research settings. What's the relationship of entanglement to coherence? Could some kind of coherence be a naturally occurring or evolutionarily sculpted entanglement system? Does an alternate possible quantum mechanism exist for coherence, perhaps hinted at by laboratory results you've heard of?

What exactly are you referring to when you say "sensory processing" and "naïve interpretations of qualia"?

And I wouldn't say your claims are "self-evident"; would you want them to be given that if they were they would be mere tautologies?

Benjamin Franklin seemed to think so, but he also almost deliberately electrocuted himself with a kite lol

The mechanisms are mysterious, its going to require a lot of hypothesis testing to find ways of observing quantum coherence. Maybe particles in natural settings coordinate their motions or phase states at a distance or in bulk without being technically entangled, conditions that aren't currently measurable.

Thinking about the relationship of human vision to qualia, it seems eyesight does involve patchiness from saccading that is partially organized neuronally pre-awareness, but this seems to be distinct structurally from what we would consider our synthetic qualitative experience. Research shows that the vast majority of neuronal activity is directed towards the senses rather than into the brain. The mind is not a passive representation of the environment, it independently generates qualia beyond the influence of a sensing that is in its basics peripheral and subsidiary to the forms of perceptual consciousness.

Glial cells compose the vast majority of the brain, perhaps it is possible that they have a role in generating qualia via an alternate process to neuron synapsing. This would explain why fiddling with neurotransmitter concentrations does not drastically alter the essentials of qualitative experience. Makes me curious what the chemical composition of glial cells is like. Maybe these cells contain molecules with similar properties to the cryptochrome pigment I mentioned with its fast triplet reaction sensitivity to magnetic fields. It would be interesting to study the effects of hallucinogenic substances on glial cells, though I'm not sure how that would be possible. Maybe this would identify some functional classes of molecules.

It probably depends on what human beings are willing to introspectively assert regarding their own minds. Qualitative experiences happen that contradict a thermodynamic interpretation of nature, and some of this has been empirically observed in systematic experiments, like synchronicity in the brainwaves of meditators, but we may find some major perceptual variability, so we have to carefully navigate around our susceptibility to prejudice when we model mental capacities. Theorizing qualia can help immensely, medically for instance, but it can also divide sub-cultures. Maybe understanding the brain mechanistically such that qualia are modellable will actually make us more tolerant. Instead of locking up ol' Phineas Gage in an institution or punching him in the nose, we ethically study him, help him and everyone else better understand and deal with what is going on, and even repair his brain.

Perhaps the substance interactions in some supposedly thermodynamic systems create temporary conditions where a model of quantum entanglement might be relevant, with a failure of traditional lab equipment to record this fluxing into unintuitive quantum states resulting from the reliance of technology's structure on the assumptions of more traditional models. Science might be seeing what it expects to see in some way, our instrumentation arbitrarily selecting unrepresentative, entirely non-quantum states of matter as it measures the environment because it is not finely grained enough, or maybe even inducing classical states as it operates. If scientists could find a way to record quantum behavior in a beaker of standard solution or a gas-filled container, that would be huge progress.

I'm not aware of any direct models of biologically occurring quantum phenomena as mechanisms with geometric architecture. Experimenting with enzymes, scientists have shown that catalytic reaction rates in supercooled solutions plateau rather than continuously decrease, suggesting the process has quantum features, some kind of tunneling behavior independent of heat. Scientists also have demonstrated in experiments that enzyme catalytic rates are sensitive to minute changes in particle size. Replacing the typical, neutron-lacking form of hydrogen in reactive molecules with deuterium, one neutron hydrogen, measurably reduces the productivity of some enzymatic processes. The speculative conclusion was that quantum tunneling of sub-atomic particles in active sites had been inhibited by larger particle size. Researchers seem to be working around quantum tunneling, gathering circumstantial evidence of its probable existence in nature, but its structural form is a mystery. I've never come across any proven images of quantum tunneling in active sites, but plenty of you guys likely know more than me.

The closest anyone had come to modeling quantum effects in biochemistry as of a couple years ago was as statistical data indicating levels of efficiency, speed, or sensitivity in bioactive chemical reactions that can be better accounted for with quantum concepts than thermodynamic concepts. I got the impression that research was progressing rapidly, so its not unlikely that major advancements have been made since then.

I'm not familiar with the details of the wave function concept, what exact quantitative information it represents. Maybe a simple inquiry, easy to address, would help explain it. What is the relationship between the form of the wave function and scale? Can a quantum wave have any size at all, or what constraints exist?

I suspect Enlightenment thinking is what made the dignifying of human life in general with social programs a government institution, though opposing trends are also in effect.

I suppose the issue is how we define social success. If its easier for some individuals to translate between their experiences, and they collectively compose the majority, should the minority be excluded completely? Some absolute minorities exist, but what if the minority in one context is the majority somewhere else, or the minority has power, or the minority gets outraged? Can we grow a culture that not only imposes minimum and constantly violated legal obligations, but also fosters self-imposed respect or even compassion for every human being transcendent to relative translatability of concepts or any additional criteria? The charitable approach has solved a lot of social problems, and the world would probably be utter chaos and misery without thought and behavior that troubles to reject stereotypes.

The assessment of translatability depends on beliefs regarding the functions, boundaries and possibilities of discourse. A subject very much in the domain of the humanities, though I gather you guys have more of an analytic approach. Maybe this discussion's angle of reasoning can help bridge the divide. I may be making nearly self-evident claims lol What do you think?

I'm not exactly making a formal logical argument, I'm stating some weird facts about quantum mechanics and conjecturing that a theoretical accounting of these phenomena might revolutionize atomic theory. Maybe the subatomic constituents of separate atoms are entangled such that the notion of atoms as discrete units will change, perhaps electrons and photons move in higher dimensions than space-time. All of this centers on deriving the best structural model of the math, and when it comes to that issue I'm the student. Basically scientists have to hypothesize possible structures as mechanisms by utilizing geometrical forms and then construct experiments that will verify or refute their hypotheses.

My hypothesis regarding consciousness is that the electromagnetic field of the brain interacts with cells by way of extremely sensitive quantum states in many molecules. I don't dispute that the biochemistry of the brain has a role in the structure of perception, as a hierarchical nesting of functional cell groupings that correlates with the orientation of more specific qualia, like an object's peripheral border as a two dimensional line positioned in space, to more general qualia, such as the total object. In Kant's terminology, we could call this various layers of a priori synthetic phenomena.

I will venture to claim that perceptual patchiness is probably an artifact of laboratory tinkering or lesions. Natural perception is at its core a fully integrated multiplicity, and in the context of biochemistry alone, what exists to be interpolated? All simultaneous synapsing of neurons consists of time-lagged relationships between cells, but perception is not time-lagged. I'm guessing electromagnetic fields and maybe entanglement effects combine as a further layer of modellable causality beyond thermodynamic motions and reactions that makes perception a more cohesive, synthetic unity than traditional biochemistry can be, not time-lagged like the behavior of spherical particles. Perception can be inaccurate, variable, and damaged, but it isn't fundamentally an illusion, its real. Perception isn't approximation of an absolute reality of particles, its the mind, and theoretical particularity is its conditional concept, with progress towards better and possibly revolutionary mechanistic concepts intuitively seeming inevitable.

Regarding ethical implications, I'm of the opinion that these new mechanisms along with many additional practical ideas can be made almost universally intelligible and acceptable to human beings, not at all obliging society to an information-based class oppression, though it seems many might disagree. This is a difficult issue because of prejudice, psychological struggle and eras of social conflict.

Our study suggests objective reality doesn't exist

A minor detail, but I'm not a fan of the suggestion that reality is not objective, I think this is a confusion of the issue. Objective reality should be defined as cultural practice based on collective models, a social function, not as a brain state, some perceptual entity, or physical objects. The more accurate view of quantum theory is probably that it does not yet provide for investigators to arbitrate between multiple possible objective interpretations, not that it implies reality is essentially subjective.

The way that concepts of subjectivity are usually invoked misleads. "Subjectivity" results from distinctions between perception and description in the individual mind, not incommensurability of human perspectives. We are subjective to ourselves, but we invent a communal objectivity that can transcend subjectivity, and that's what makes civilized institutions even possible. We commonly reinforce social divisiveness with deceitful or flawed collectivity in the guise of proposed "objectivity" or "subjectivity", and this can sabotage the entire theoretical project, but we've got to be reasonable for this truth to be implemented behaviorally.

I am not sure what you think the role of quantum effects are going to be in modeling perception "directly." I mean, quantum fields aren't qualitatively different from, say, classical fields, nor is quantum mechanics that much more complex or information-dense than classical mechanics. There is no mystery stuff there, it's the same kind physics.

Like I touched upon, subatomic particles, ions, and small atoms have weird properties under many conditions, as diffuse wavicles that can tunnel across relatively large distances nearly instantaneously, adopt the form of multiple superposed phase states, morph in response to thermodynamically negligible amounts of energy, interact without direct contact, exist and move in higher dimensions than space-time such that the classical model of sequential causality might obsolesce, and more strangeness. I imagine scientists finding instances of quantum behavior to be so pervasive that atomic theory will be completely transformed, especially as we gain an improved understanding of entanglement, synchronicity effects and retroactive causality in both organic and inorganic settings, but this is currently all reasonable speculation.

I'm conjecturing that the synthetic fluidity of perception can only be explained with quantum entanglement or some kind of quantum mechanism. If chemical reactions are the totality of mental processes, this lack of real integration would be mirrored by experience, but qualia in essence contrast with the time-lagged efficient causality of thermodynamic chemistry distributed in three-dimensional space. Mind seems to be caused by a phenomenon beyond mere concepts of spherical particles. As far as I can discern, these dynamics will be modelled both as emergent from atomic biochemistry and in contradiction to traditional principles of matter.