Re: The phantasmagorical, Magical, but meaningless, Membrane

[cruelfate45]

are we in control of our cells? are cells in control of their internal processes? what does "in control" mean? I agree we can't seperate ourselves from nature in terms of experience, but in terms of conscious thought, we most certainly can and do seperate ourselves from nature in order to examine it. what does that tell us about the relationship between arrangements of molecules? cells and their environment? human beings and the world? think about a mirror... good vid as usual

[otonanoC]

Stuart Kaufman and his cohorts are now describing life forms as "effective dissipaters of gradients". I could quote also someone claiming that "the more complex an organism, the more effective it is at dissipating a gradient."

Anyways, all of this post-darwinian abiogenesis science must account for the lifelessness on planet Mars. Mars seems to be a ready-made laboratory ready to tell us about the conditions life requires outside of mere self-organization+thermodynami­cs.

[0ThouArtThat0]

I am as interested as you to see what we discover about geophysiology by studying Mars. It seems only some planets arise in niches where life can flourish, rather than fossilize. It is very possible that patches of bacterial-type life once lived for short periods on the surface of Mars, but could not get a hold on the planet's climate dynamics in time to stabilize a more permanent stint.

[StevenErnest]

Matt, if you're not going to respond to any of my comments or critiques anymore, I won't bother. I have other things to do.

[patternsinchaos]

One of the most interesting things I learned in Hofstadter's class on the geometry of circles and triangles is what happens when you "invert" a geometric form outside a circle to inside it's perimeter. It's the most basic simple process with astounding implications. Google wolfram and inversion.

[StevenErnest]

What are the basic implications?

[patternsinchaos]

The way I see it, Geometric Inversion indicates the reason for the emergence of the circle and sphere as the primary forms of self-similar recursive duality. It indicates demonstrated that space curves back on itself- in other words what the spherical nature of the Earth might indicate about it's relationship to the rest of space.

[cardellacole1]

or should i say excelent exorcise of the will in concert with polaric superiority

[cardellacole1]

excelent relaxed atitude matt well done

[debswildhoney]

The link in the description box is a great and quick video. It was educational for me and filled me with awe.

[Mork5]

what does the membrane concept mean to consciousness ?

as a holon is a pattern of coordinated events,

do the limits of action define the limits of cognition,

as what and HOW cannot be thought / known ?

does the emergence of a holon establish a duality of interaction vs intraaction, external vs self-preception ?

is there a gradation from vital to arbitrary ?

[0ThouArtThat0]

The membrane has become, in "higher" organisms, the brain/nervous system. They are each life's way of making distinctions. Distinctions are the recognition of signs, and so the more of them we can make, the more meaning we encounter. Brains recognize more meaning than membranes, and so are more conscious than single cells. ("more" is not a value judgment... as Goethe said, "every creature has its own reason to be"... more is just a rough measure of the depth of our distinctions)

[LimpLoser]

lol. those are good videos. they look like mechanical devices in a factory. Great.

[plenipotentiarius]

Both you and inMendham seem to be talking about two different things.

He can't see how theoretical discussion of the origins of life would improve our bodily life, here & now. How else can we escape ecological disaster without a deeper understanding?

You can't see how inMendham tries hard not to allow mindless discussions regards angels on pinheads to distract the pushing ahead of a rationalist program. Where are the limits of mindless prattle?

[StevenErnest]

1. Ha! You said, "it's an increase in complexity." Gotcha! ^_^ This membrane-DNA activity is fascinating, if true. The only problem, Matt, as I see it, is you are so fixed on your conscious-matter hypothesis -- no, it's more of a belief of yours, that you keep coming to unsupported conclusions.

[StevenErnest]

2. Hey, I'm really on your side, but you have to have logical concepts. You said: "...it's aware of its own doing."

Where exactly do you get that? That's YOUR reading of the membrane-DNA activity. And why is life "pure chance?" Given enough time, the right mix of chemical reactions, life appears... they've found it in toxic caves, the ocean vents, Antarctic, in my socks.

[StevenErnest]

3. Where do you get: "DNA can remember what it has tried?" Again, you are anthropomorphizing. Knock it off. ;)

Likening the boundary of a cell membrane to cities is a very cool metaphor; but I don't know how far you can take it.

"Organisms act consciously." duh, that's a given. But if you're trying to extend this to cells, etc., I just don't see it.

And finally, of course we can't separate ourselves from nature, we ARE nature.

[StevenErnest]

4. Finally, again. You are way more in the academic arena than I am, so I can see the two camps: the everything is discrete and separate -- versus the holistic, process, interconnected, holon group. I'm with the latter.

If you can provide some Ph.D's and biologists who subscribe to your conscious-matter idea, please bring them forth, (if you haven't already.

It's entertaining to see you keep engaging Gary, you must enjoy banging your intelligent head against a rock hard wall. ^_^

[jogayot]

well here e.g. watch?v=qqpe30hozmE

[StevenErnest]

Thanks! I'll give it a viewing.

[jogayot]

well, if you watched matt carefully this is video he pointed to himself... not long ago. i was never much into biology and psychology... more into physics, math, computers and a pinch of philosophy and literture, but having bumped into matt my thinking sortof converged and crystallized, lately (read: from last year).

[StevenErnest]

I watched the interview: she essentially says that consciousness came into the universe, because the universe and matter are conscious. That's a tautology. She doesn't have to prove it's conscious -- science has to prove it's unconscious. This is qualitatively the same argument for a God, which she refers to.

I have a very strong affinity for the Eastern Philosophic view, Mysticism, and the Perennial Philosophy -- which is what this is: intuition and speculation. It is not yet science.

[0ThouArtThat0]

Hey Steve, sorry I haven't responded yet, just trying to find a new approach to answer some of your concerns. "it is aware of its own doing" - I get this out of the phenomenology of biology, which is just another philosophical tradition with its own assumptions, etc, but let us not relativize all thought; surely there are more and less appropriate ways of conceiving the world. How we are to measure such things has a lot to do with our actual experience of reality, and to my mind...

[0ThouArtThat0]

...interpretting the behavior of biological systems as possessing a correlated phenomenological experience follows from my own experience as a biological system. If I am like this, I extrapolate and assume other biological systems much be similar. I cannot prove that a cell is aware of its own doing, but neither can I prove that you are.

From the materialistic/mechanistic perspective, life has to be a nearly improbable fluke because it is assumed that life originated due to nucleic acids...

[0ThouArtThat0]

...accidentally coming together in just the right sequence that just so happened to be capable of replicating itself (laboratory experiments have shown that nude replicating DNA quickly degrades and becomes incapable of reproduction after relatively few generations, so it seems that life requires that a leap, or emergence, take place all at once such that a minimal level of complexity is achieved and thereafter maintained and in fact extended).

[0ThouArtThat0]

You could say "given enough time..." anything is possible, but for DNA to randomly coalesce into a viable combination is so improbable that we would not expect to find such an event in anything less than a hundred billion years (these are estimates based on Kauffman's calculations). This is obviously way more than the 14 or so billion since the creation of our universe, and the 5 or so billion since the Earth was formed...

[0ThouArtThat0]

...so either life is, for all intents and purposes, an infinitely improbable accident, or it is a natural result of the 2nd law of thermodynamics and the tendencies of matter to self-organize due to what I think we can appropriately call its "intelligence." Forgive me for anthropomorphizing, but if the universe did create us, don't we have reason to believe it is a human universe?

[0ThouArtThat0]

Saying panexperientialism and process ontology is "not yet science" may not be the best way of looking at this. If the cosmos turns out not to fit into the machine metaphor of traditional science (which I think the last 100 years of data all but confirms), then it is science that must change, not the cosmos (at least if science wants to remain the most appropriate means of knowing reality).

[StevenErnest]

I say it is not yet science, because I don't see any scientifically verifiable arguments proving it. As in that inteview with Elisabet Shartoris. I agree that science needs to move in a more wholistic direction. I agree that the machine metaphor is not accurate. I appreciate the theoretical movement in this direction, I think it is valid.

[StevenErnest]

I don't recall reading that the odds against the appearance of life are quite that extremely improbable; that's new to me.

Life's been found in polar regions, ocean vents, and in caves of naturally toxic material, similar to the primordial Earth.

Stephen J. Gould said it's probably teeming in the crust's crevices. Life may exist on a moon of Jupiter, Europa, which is covered in ice, but is liquid water underneath, and heat would be generated by the tidal forces of Jupiter's gravity.

[StevenErnest]

If matter does have a tendency to self-organize -- and I haven't read enough -- saying it is "due to its intelligence" is indeed anthropomorphizing, or at least stretching the definition of intelligence.

"...but if the universe did create us, don't we have reason to believe it is a human universe?" That's a big "if."

I think that for most life, existence is deterministic, but the wonder of humans is that we have self-awareness, reflection, thought, language -- we can guide our destiny.

[StevenErnest]

But biological systems vary greatly in their degree of complexity; you are vastly more evolved and complex than most organisms; I'm only referring to the brain here.

You said that you cannot prove that I am aware of its/mine own doing? What is Behavioural Psychology? The entire field of Psychology!

(I just remembered, you should see a video I did reading a piece by Usula K. LeGuin; it's science fiction, written like a study of animal and plant art.)

[StevenErnest]

Okay, Matt, that's cool. I thought you might be getting tired of me, that I was becoming a pest, ;) But if you can put up with Gary...

I've been trying not to repeat myself. I was looking into this, and read that neuroscience is only very recently taking on the mystery of consciousness.  I found an online article by Francis Crick and Christof Koch about this. What neurons are involved in what thought processes? This is called the neuronal correlates of consciousness, NCC.

[jogayot]

stealing ideas left and right... get off the walls! the city fight on! shoo! shoo! you dirty spartan! athens will forever remain free and intelligent!

[zezt]

self organizing intelligence='matter'

Watts' "skin encapsulated ego" is a membrane dulled by dull ideas. It cannot feel. Cells 'cannot feel' because 'small-thinking-brain' thinks they 'crude'!

AIR 'cannot feel'. SPACE 'cannot fee' for same reasons. 'small-thinking-brain'.

what 'small-thinking-brain' wants, 'small-thinking-brain' gets!

[CousinoMacul]

DNA is a very efficient carrier of information, but I really doubt that it existed in the first cells that reproduced genetically. I think the "RNA world" hypothesis is very credible. In fact, if you study any living cell today, you'll see that we still live in an "RNA world." DNA merely acts as RNA's "back-up drive."

[0ThouArtThat0]

I haven't done extensive reading on the RNA world hypothesis by any means, but Kauffman seems to think nude replicating RNA would be too error prone and so would lead to cascading mutations and in relatively few generations fail in an error catastrophe. He thinks there is a minimal amount of complexity required before life can be said to have emerged, and that somehow it's got to achieve it all at once as a natural result of entropy and a membrane bound soup of autocatalytic molecules.

[CousinoMacul]

I haven't read Kaufman on the RNA world theory, but I will look it up. I would argue that it would be more error prone than DNA replication (which is precisely why DNA replication evolved), but still better (from a natural selection viewpoint) than sans nucleic acid.

[CousinoMacul]

My personal theory is that life began as micelles with membranes that grew and divided (G&D) organically. Those that acquired metabolic capacities were able to G&D more efficiently. Unfortunately, those properties could get diluted with cell division.

[CousinoMacul]

Later, those that acquired some sort of replication capabilities (maybe RNA or a now extinct RNA precursor) would be able to efficiently preserve those metabolic properties in their progeny. At this point, natural selection would favor the most efficient and faithful replicators--hence DNA.

Well, that's my theory.