Thoughts on Abiogenesis

[Occams Barber]

Hang on a sec .. the chicken gets added first doesn't it?

? I thought everybody kept their chickens in the fridge. It calms them down and sedates them a little just before I remove their heads and pluck'em.

OB

 

[Shemjaza]

then this is just a superficial discussion. at some point, there was no life, and then there was life but this discussion doesn't go that deep. we can talk about seeds and trees or inanimate converting to animate forever but none of that genuinely bridges the gap of life from a state of no life as they are all based on self-contained processes in a vacuum.

No one is proposing a specific answer to "How did life naturally arise from non life."

Can you describe what you see the "gap of life from a state of no life" is?

The simplest life forms or life like structures like viruses and prions just seem to be little different from any chemical reaction with nothing aside from straight mechanistic chemical reactions to the world around them.

 

[Bradskii]

? I thought everybody kept their chickens in the fridge. It calms them down and sedates them a little just before I remove their heads and pluck'em.

OB

Oh, lahdi dah. We 'remove their heads and pluck 'em' do we? You'll be telling us you cook them next...

 

[DamianWarS]

So, where I would say that the 'first cause' of life was a chemical process acting on non-living matter, you might say it was God acting on non-living matter?

If I've interpreted you correctly - do you think that God used natural processes or did He do something contrary to what we might expect of a naturalistic explanation?

OB

I'm not sure, as I said I'm agnostic to the specifics however the supernatural/natural at some point would seem to require to have overlap (if we are to say God caused it). Christianity doesn't really answer this, there are of course non-negotiables like there is a God and he is a source of all things but the how part is not the point but rather the who.

 

[Occams Barber]

I'm not sure, as I said I'm agnostic to the specifics however the supernatural/natural at some point would seem to require to have overlap (if we are to say God caused it). Christianity doesn't really answer this, there are of course non-negotiables like there is a God and he is a source of all things but the how part is not the point but rather the who.

Fair enough. "I'm not sure" is a very reasonable answer.

As an atheist, to me there obviously is no 'who' so I'm left with the 'how' and only one alternative. Life must have originated as a product of the natural environment.

I've never been a Christian so I can't imagine what it means to be a believer.

OB

 

[Ophiolite]

Anything on Mustachioed Mountain Marmots? I was sitting on the side of a mountain in Colorado during our filed geology course. Discussing something with a TA. All of a sudden a.marmot appears. It goes underneath the TA's legs and between the two of us and was gone. The marmot probably did not have a mustache.

Mobile mountain marmots may make master mineralogist miss mindful movement midst marmot motion.

 

[Subduction Zone]

if I leave a piece of meat out and let it rot to discover it's then covered in maggots where did the maggots come from? did the inanimate meat spontaneously generate the maggots? that's what this argument amounts to. every inanimate to animate conversion is explained through a self-contained process that is dependant upon the animate. your argument demonstrates the conversion in a vacuum where life pre-exists but does not address outside the vacuum. the same logic could be used to point to an outside influence.

Don't accuse others of your flaws. You are conflating abiogenesis and spontaneous generation. You should really learn the difference.

Spontaneous generation is the sudden appearance of modern life. It is essentially a creationist belief. Abiogenesis is the arrival of life by natural means. Not the same thing at all.

 

[Subduction Zone]

how is the reaction produced? by introducing an outside force.

Guess what we have on the Earth. An outside "force". It is morning here and that outside force shines in my window and gets in my eyes.

 

[Vap841]

The brain is an incredibly complex system - around 80 billion neurons with trillions of connections between them. When such a complex system is 'idling', not occupied with important everyday matters of survival, it can 'freewheel', in various ways - making plans, combining ideas in new ways, reminiscing, daydreaming, being creative, and releasing tensions by being silly (which may also be a means of social bonding using humour, derived from early play).

This appears to be more than just a side-effect of not being specifically occupied - there is a whole neural system that becomes active when this kind of activity is going on, the Default Mode Network. This suggests that these things play an important role in our success as a species.

Ok so then technically there isn’t gonna be a physical sequence step #1 when I decide to start hopping on my left leg, because tons of neurons are in a constant freewheel, more like “Several thousand neurons will ‘Change course’ from their idling movements when I decide to hop on my leg”? It still seems like a step #1 to me though (that’s in lockstep with my will) and it’s a step #1 that has no necessity to take place by any physical laws, just a more complex step #1. So a bunch of electrical potentials build up for a series of action events to take place (I hop on my leg), it can’t possibly be predictable!

So let’s say we have a room full of chemical vats, and in one section of the room was also me with a bunch of electrodes connected to my body, finally we had the greatest scientific minds analyzing all of the complex data (and computer programs showing complex data in real time). Now they told me to just randomly start doing stuff. The directions that my freewheeling neurons decide to go in would be unpredictable, they could only speak of all the causes & effects of my neurons after the fact, whereas they would be able to predict the future action of every chemical vat with accuracy. My will is the missing ingredient, my will is why my neuron movements were unpredictable.

 

[Ophiolite]

It is morning here and that outside force shines in my window and gets in my eyes.

So, you don't live in Scotland?

 

[Subduction Zone]

So, you don't live in Scotland?

I am not sure where I live any longer. Scotland used to be a good analog for my area, but we just had what was almost surely an AGW record heat wave. I have had the heat on in my house on the third of July and earlier this week it hit 102. That is a first for my city.

 

[Ophiolite]

I am not sure where I live any longer. Scotland used to be a good analog for my area, but we just had what was almost surely an AGW record heat wave. I have had the heat on in my house on the third of July and earlier this week it hit 102. That is a first for my city.

BC? Don't respond if you'd rather not.

 

[SelfSim]

.. The directions that my freewheeling neurons decide to go in would be unpredictable, they could only speak of all the causes & effects of my neurons after the fact, whereas they would be able to predict the future action of every chemical vat with accuracy. My will is the missing ingredient, my will is why my neuron movements were unpredictable.

I'm not at all convinced that some other part of your conscious brain could not predict what your next outwardly unpredictable movement(s) would be (moment by passing moment). Therefore, the 'free will' there, is only what is apparent to external observers but it is still fully predictable to the part of your brain which responded to the original request made by those scientists.

Also, not all chemical reactions can be predicted with accuracy at all scales of observation. In complex reactions, no two reaction experiments will proceed in exactly the same way, because they are extremely sensitive to the initial conditions (such as concentrations, small temperature fluctuations, etc). The Briggs-Raucher reaction I posted previously belongs to a family of (organic) catalytic reactions which have this unpredictability property.

There is evidence that (a healthy) brain operates on a finely tuned balancing point, between predictability and chaotic operation, which gives it the property of being entirely capable of giving the outward impression of free will ..

 

[AV1611VET]

Glenn Morton and Thaumaturgy got into a doosey of an argument over global warming in this thread:

The Holocene Deniers

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

Ok so then technically there isn’t gonna be a physical sequence step #1 when I decide to start hopping on my left leg, because tons of neurons are in a constant freewheel, more like “Several thousand neurons will ‘Change course’ from their idling movements when I decide to hop on my leg”? It still seems like a step #1 to me though (that’s in lockstep with my will) and it’s a step #1 that has no necessity to take place by any physical laws, just a more complex step #1. So a bunch of electrical potentials build up for a series of action events to take place (I hop on my leg), it can’t possibly be predictable!

I'm not quite sure what you're asking here, but we have a whole repertoire of behaviours that can be mixed and matched together with improvisations; the precise causal sequence behind such activities are too complex to track with current technology, or to introspect beyond the initial urge or a sense of boredom perhaps. But that's why we say things like "I just felt like it".

I think the systems associated with consciousness may have some influence on the non-conscious processes, but it's a two-way street, feed-forward and feed-back. Most of the impetus or motivation for action seems to originate below conscious awareness, and we become consciously aware of it as it enters/claims the focus of attention, when the conscious self ('we') usually arrogates authorship or agency - unless it goes wrong, in which case the conscious self tends to disclaim responsibility (e.g. "I didn't mean to do that", "I don't know how that happened", etc). But it's all 'us', whether we're conscious of it or not.

So let’s say we have a room full of chemical vats, and in one section of the room was also me with a bunch of electrodes connected to my body, finally we had the greatest scientific minds analyzing all of the complex data (and computer programs showing complex data in real time). Now they told me to just randomly start doing stuff. The directions that my freewheeling neurons decide to go in would be unpredictable, they could only speak of all the causes & effects of my neurons after the fact, whereas they would be able to predict the future action of every chemical vat with accuracy. My will is the missing ingredient, my will is why my neuron movements were unpredictable.

That's not how it's seen in neuroscience. In principle, it would be possible to predict what you would do, given all the data about what was going on in your brain. But in practice, although human behaviour is surprisingly predictable in general, behaviour depends not just on the neurons and their connections, but the patterns of activity between them that a given state produces.

These emergent interacting patterns of activity are probably not predictable without running an exact emulation of your brain from that particular state. This unpredictability is a common consequence of emergent activity - even the behaviour of the emergent patterns of simple cellular automata like Game of Life is not predictable without running an emulation. Often emergent activity follows a new set of rules or laws which makes it predictable to some degree, but you have to discover what those emergent rules are to make use of them.

As far as neuroscience is concerned, your 'will' is the name for (something like) the sort of patterns of activity that represent feelings and the patterns that follow from them that represent decisions about those feelings. It's a bit more complicated than that, of course, but that's the gist of it.

 

[Vap841]

I'm not at all convinced that some other part of your conscious brain could not predict what your next outwardly unpredictable movement(s) would be (moment by passing moment). Therefore, the 'free will' there, is only what is apparent to external observers but it is still fully predictable to the part of your brain which responded to the original request made by those scientists.

I’m trying to get to the total beginning, so if we say that some part of the physical brain gave a physical indication that predicts movement #1 then I wouldn’t call that movement #1 I would call it movement #2, and this physical precursor that you’re calling a prediction would itself be movement #1.

Also, not all chemical reactions can be predicted with accuracy at all scales of observation. In complex reactions, no two reaction experiments will proceed in exactly the same way, because they are extremely sensitive to the initial conditions (such as concentrations, small temperature fluctuations, etc). The Briggs-Raucher reaction I posted previously belongs to a family of (organic) catalytic reactions which have this unpredictability property.

I am assuming an exhaustive scientific knowledge.

There is evidence that (a healthy) brain operates on a finely tuned balancing point, between predictability and chaotic operation, which gives it the property of being entirely capable of giving the outward impression of free will ..

I too believe in a balancing point, but between automated motions and actions of will. If our actions are in sync with our desires to perform these actions then I don’t know why it would be justified to chalk the desires up as illusory

 

[SelfSim]

Coming back onto the Abiogenesis topic, I should point out that the Briggs Rauscher reaction I posted in the YouTube link before, was a discovered reaction based on the research of Boris Pavlovich Belousov (1893-1970), who was looking for an inorganic analog of the Krebs (or citric acid) cycle .. a key metabolic life process, in which citric acid is an intermediate.

As it turns out, inorganic oscillators were also subsequently discovered, such as the chlorite-iodide-arsenite reaction.

So the point here, is that non linear, inorganic chemistries are known, (ie: have been demonstrated to exist), which function along the same general physical principles as all modern life's organically based metabolic chemistry.

This class of reactions is the evidence which underpins the claim of the possibility of the emergence of the life-critical process of metabolism, from inorganic (or inanimate) chemistries, by way of natural processes.

 

[SelfSim]

I’m trying to get to the total beginning, so if we say that some part of the physical brain gave a physical indication that predicts movement #1 then I wouldn’t call that movement #1 I would call it movement #2, and this physical precursor that you’re calling a prediction would itself be movement #1.

However, the brain process science is talking about, is a continuous process (with feedback). At this level of consciousness, it doesn't necessarily display an awareness 'first' or 'second' (etc) movement. Its described as a continuous loop which produces both predictable and unpredictable actions, for as long as the brain-possessing organism is alive.

I am assuming an exhaustive scientific knowledge.

Ok .. that's your assumption then (and there is no testable evident basis for the existence of such absolute knowledge).
Aka: its your own personal assumption .. and your own personal model (and thus, its up to you to drive it somewhere useful .. or at least, hopefully useful)?

I too believe in a balancing point, but between automated motions and actions of will.

See, I don't believe what you're responding to there .. because I don't have to .. so, I'm unclear about why you're equating your beliefs with my statements of where objective testing takes science(?)

If our actions are in sync with our desires to perform these actions then I don’t know why it would be justified to chalk the desires up as illusory

Not a bad definition of 'illusory' you've given there .. I'm not sure about what your point is there, though(?)

 

[Vap841]

I think the systems associated with consciousness may have some influence on the non-conscious processes, but it's a two-way street, feed-forward and feed-back. Most of the impetus or motivation for action seems to originate below conscious awareness, and we become consciously aware of it as it enters/claims the focus of attention, when the conscious self ('we') usually arrogates authorship or agency

Have you ever seen the movie Fallen where the demon keeps switching bodies? So I believe we have a will, but to agree with what you say here I definitely think that physical composition pulls & pushes at us in certain ways that can most definitely “Test” our will. That there’s an undertow of emotions underneath the surface of consciousness. If we could hop from body to body like in Fallen it would still be “Us” each time, however we would be subject to the mood swings/stresses/carefreeness of each body we hopped into. It wouldn’t be the same exact result for each body like in that movie.

If you took over the body of your manic depressive neighbor you would feel all kinds of novel dreary feelings that you can’t explain, but it’s still your will so you may or may not allow that body to pull you down into depression like your neighbor did. And I even think that an optimistic will could to a certain extent heal that body over time (look at the health of happy people vs sad people, all things being equal). You improve your health if you force yourself to adopt better moods.

So Next you hop into the body of your friend who is known to be the happiest dude in the world, you start to realize that it takes way more to stress you out than it did before, and that you’re capable of getting into great moods much easier, yet it’s still you. There’s just something more emotionally favorable about his body than your old one. Jump into one body and you’re more inclined for good moods, jump in another body and you’re more inclined to get stressed out, but it’s still you.

I recently saw but didn’t comment on a post that I didn’t agree with, the poster pretty much excused someone for going on a killing spree because he undeniably suffered a certain brain injury that is known to incline people towards violent behavior. I can not give that guy a pass, if your will hopped into his body you might just live out your days being miserable and rude to people. Or maybe you commit suicide. I’ve known many mentally ill people and there’s variation on how they allow it to control them.

But in practice, although human behaviour is surprisingly predictable in general, behaviour depends not just on the neurons and their connections, but the patterns of activity between them that a given state produces.

I won’t at all disagree with general predictability.

As far as neuroscience is concerned, your 'will' is the name for (something like) the sort of patterns of activity that represent feelings and the patterns that follow from them that represent decisions about those feelings. It's a bit more complicated than that, of course, but that's the gist of it.

Ahh ok, interesting. I have a decent bit of material on neuroscience and biochemistry that I have been dragging my feet on and hopefully I will get to it soon. I definitely wanna get a better feel for the technical details and terminology.

 

[Vap841]

However, the brain process science is talking about, is a continuous process (with feedback). At this level of consciousness, it doesn't necessarily display an awareness 'first' or 'second' (etc) movement. Its described as a continuous loop which produces both predictable and unpredictable actions, for as long as the brain-possessing organism is alive.

I might be getting confused about what predictability we’re talking about, are we talking about the scientists in the room predicting my future body movements? I don’t understand why the mind would be said to be predicting itself, wouldn’t we instead just call it the brain process that corresponds to the mind willing an action?

Ok .. that's your assumption then (and there is no testable evident basis for the existence of such absolute knowledge).
Aka: its your own personal assumption .. and your own personal model (and thus, its up to you to drive it somewhere useful .. or at least, hopefully useful)?

Maybe assumption wasn’t a good word to use, I’m basically just saying “Given a future science of exhaustive knowledge” as opposed to me saying something like “Aha I win since science currently can’t point to it yet.”

See, I don't believe what you're responding to there .. because I don't have to .. so, I'm unclear about why you're equating your beliefs with my statements of where objective testing takes science(?)

I was only agreeing that we both believe in a balancing point. But they are different, yours is of materialism mine is dualism.

Not a bad definition of 'illusory' you've given there .. I'm not sure about what your point is there, though(?)

We’re not abandoning the belief in free will based actions because it’s counter-intuitive, in fact free will is the most intuitive thing that there is, we’re abandoning the belief in free will to accommodate a closed system of materialism.