Friday, July 25, 2008

Tracks on Mars

An image recently posted on a web site: tractor-like tread marks impressed onto a barren sandy landscape curve back toward a preternaturally close horizon. The reason the horizon seems foreshortened is that the picture is of Mars, taken by a camera mounted on a vehicle sent from earth to explore the planet's surface. Now, if life can be explained as a property of the constituent materials that form its physical structures, then we also have to say that it is a property of those constituent materials (the complex molecules and the principle elements that compose them) that they will eventually gather themselves together and be propelled from the planet Earth to the planet Mars where they will leave tractor tracks that can be photographed and transmitted for viewing back to Earth. Isn't this an obvious absurdity?
It seems that scientists can be just as blinkered as anyone else- maybe more so, since their brand of blinkered approach has been successful at doing things like sending machines to Mars. Hopefully I'll be able to explain why a blinkered approach can have power to bring about physical changes in the fabric of the universe, but for now I'll cite a representative example of that blinkered view as it tries to explain away the uniqueness of life and reduce it to a mere physical process just like any other to be found in chemistry.
The name of the biochemist is Norman W. Pirie* writing in the essay, "The meaninglessness of the Terms 'Life' and 'Living.'" He compares the gradations between inanimate matter and life as analogous to the gradations from acid to basic in chemistry, which seems to be dependant on the kinds of bonds formed by the hydrogen atom. And therefore all can be explained in terms of 'one quantity- hydrogen ion concentration.' There you go, folks. Apparently, if a suitably intelligent being from a universe completely unlike our own was informed of the principles of hydrogen ion concentration he would be able to predict the formation of living beings who would send machines to neighboring planets.
Now, I don't mean to ridicule professor Pirie as I am sure he was a fine and competent biochemist. But the trouble with people who spend their lives with their noses jammed up against their fields of expertise, is that they tend to see everything in terms of what they are intimately familiar with. They rarely have reasons to question their own logic as long the work they do extends the knowledge within their field. And for laboratory scientists that means the evidence of their senses as enhanced by their instruments is what counts. Theory and logic are ad hoc affairs which very much resemble what theologians call faith. A Freudian will go into a supermarket and see nothing but phallic symbols lining the aisles. An accountant will tend to interpret the world in terms of assets and liabilities.
But while Pirie can tell us that the quality we call 'acidity' is associated with the concentration of hydrogen ions in a given substance, he can't say exactly what acidity is. Acidity is an abstraction, just like heat is. Heat is something that burns. Its a label we use to denominate a physical sensation. Science is what picks apart the factors that cause that physical sensation and we have mathematics that make it possible to calculate those factors. But ultimately we haven't yet explained the sensation. Nevertheless we know very well that there is such a thing as hot.
And here's the thing: we know very well from the evidence of our senses that things like heat, acid, light, etc exist, but we don't know very much about them except through our ability to reason. And so I don't really think we've progressed that far since the days of Plato in answering the extremely basic question of what we know and how we know it. If twentieth century philosophers are any indication it would seem we are totally lost. They've all come a cropper. Existence is just as mysterious and unfathomable as ever.

*From The Origins of Life by Cyril Ponnamperuna