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
Friday, July 25, 2008
Monday, June 9, 2008
Evolving
We don't need a theory to tell us that life, even in its most rudimentary forms, actively transforms inert matter into the substances it incorporates into its physical being. This is known from clear observation. It's called eating. We multicellular creatures almost from the start adopted a body plan to deliver nutrients to the cells that make up our various forms. This underlying body plan consists of a mouth, a gut, and an anus. Materialistic science proposes a theory which asserts that this orchestrated activity is a property of the substances that make up every living thing. This means the various elements, like carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, which assemble themselves into incredibly intricate and complex molecules like sugars, lipids, proteins, which become blood, skin, bone, nerve tissue. This means the blossoming of an embryo into a child is no different than the combining of sodium with chlorine into common salt. But living things act differently than inanimate substances.
Salt is a crystal and we are told that some crystals propagate themselves in ways analogous to living things, thus indicating how life originated as a natural, ie random, phenomenon. Which has continued to transform itself into more and more complex chemicals. Obviously, it's hard to imagine how life could exist without the chemical constituents of the physical body. However, looking at the tableau of life on earth it seems equally obvious that some other principle is at play than randomicity. It appears to this observer that life, that utterly intangible concept, is the opposite of random; it intentionally uses the material constituents of the universe to assemble a physical presence in that universe.
Because Life is the ultimate abstract concept. We humans along with daffodils, slugs, and lichens, use virtually identical materials to create radically different organisms which have radically different affects on the physical earth. Living things are responsible for the makeup of the earth's atmosphere, for the structure and distribution of rocks in the continental crust, perhaps for seeding clouds to form raindrops, and for moderating the climate so that wild swings of temperature are avoided. As a result of life, the behaviors of living things, this planet of ours is an entirely different kind of object than it would be if it was lifeless.
Most of this action is a byproduct of the chemical activities which take place within a cell, and there is no suggestion here that some sort of conspiracy took place among the spirochetes and the polyps to come up with all this but there is no denying that the world that has come about through their influence is a place more congenial to life than it was in the beginning.
In fact it became so congenial that a veritable explosion of life has occurred not only in the amount of inanimate material that is now either alive or of organic origin ready to be recycled again, but in the kaleidoscopic variety of life, far beyond the most vivid imagination. This amounts to a riot of invention. Even now researchers are being surprised by new and unbelievable discoveries.
Much of this explosive diversity seems to be due to the 'invention' of the eukaryote cell which seems to be linked to the 'invention' of sexuality. Researchers are constantly finding new ways living things have of exchanging genetic information. It could be that viruses and cancers are such methods. But with sexuality and a nucleus this exchange of what amounts to an accumulation of knowledge about experimental investigations. Death might also be thought of as another innovation that promoted the diversification of life forms. Bacteria are basically immortal because they proliferate by dividing. An individual bacteria can die but its clones continue on. Therefore the accumulation of 'knowledge' within the genetic apparatus is slow, although it now appears that interspecies exchanges of genetic code is more common than suspected. Sexual reproduction regularizes the exchange of genetic information which results in more rapid innovation. These innovations are more structural than chemical, or more accurately the chemistry of individual cells specializes. Both plants and animals have light sensitive cells, but plants use them to produce sugar and animals use them to see with. The whole story is available for examination, but what was already a difficult problem in Darwin's day has only grown more intractable as more information has been accumulated by scientists. At the time for instance, the idea of separate species didn't seem problematic. There were dogs, cats, apes, flies toadstools, and it was all perfectly straightforward except in certain unusual cases. The discovery of genetics seemed to simplify and resolve the questions of how, but does it? In animals, energy production is largely a function of mitochondria. Although enclosed within the nucleus mitochondria are actually separate organelles with their own genetic structures. Mitochondria more or less define what an animal is. Plants derive their energy from a different organelle, the chloroplast, which is able to convert sunlight into sugar, which can be metered out in the precise quantity needed by the plant for growth and reproduction. It is now thought that chloroplasts and mitochondria were originally independent entities which the precursors of plants and animals hijacked for their own use. There don't appear to be any free ranging mitochondria or chloroplasts roaming the oceans or the dry land nowadays. Question: do we use them for our benefit or do they use us for theirs? They may have started out as parasites or infections, and parasitism and infection are major issues for all living things, even us two legged geniuses. A recent type of parasitism recently observed is a fungus transmitted from cats to rodents. Harmless to cats, the fungus causes the rat or mouse to be attracted to the smell of cat piss. Could it be that those strange ladies living with hundreds of cats have contracted the same infection?
But not all parasitism is harmful. Sometimes it's entirely beneficial, in which case the relationship between host and guest is called symbiosis. As in the complex population of microbes living in our guts without which we would not be able to digest our food. Certain varieties of E. Coli perform these services for us, and it is well known that cows are only able to digest grasses with the help of microorganisms that convert otherwise indigestible cellulose into sugar. Neat trick. Without those bacteria cows would die out...and all that flatulence that so terrifies the econazis. But without cows to keep those grasses in check who knows what calamities would transpire. Sounds like a business opportunity for the Goracle. But for the purposes of this discussion, can cows be considered a species apart from the happy bacteria busily fermenting cellulose in all those bovine stomachs? And how is this explicable in terms of Darwinian theory? Cooperation, competition, parasitism leading to terrestrial transformation. Neat trick.
Here's an interesting factoid I read of not long ago. It had to do with fruit flies where the writer informed his readers that there is more genetic variation within one species of fruit flies than there is spread out among the entire order of mammalia. I have no reason to doubt this information since it was conveyed by someone who had spent his life studying cladistics, but if this is so then what exactly does genetics have to do with species- by which I will continue to mean dogs and cats and rats and so on.
I am asking all these questions not because I am trying to discredit the idea of evolution. I have no doubt it took place. But how? And what does it mean to our understanding of the universe, ourselves, God, art, time, and this strange experience of being alive?
Salt is a crystal and we are told that some crystals propagate themselves in ways analogous to living things, thus indicating how life originated as a natural, ie random, phenomenon. Which has continued to transform itself into more and more complex chemicals. Obviously, it's hard to imagine how life could exist without the chemical constituents of the physical body. However, looking at the tableau of life on earth it seems equally obvious that some other principle is at play than randomicity. It appears to this observer that life, that utterly intangible concept, is the opposite of random; it intentionally uses the material constituents of the universe to assemble a physical presence in that universe.
Because Life is the ultimate abstract concept. We humans along with daffodils, slugs, and lichens, use virtually identical materials to create radically different organisms which have radically different affects on the physical earth. Living things are responsible for the makeup of the earth's atmosphere, for the structure and distribution of rocks in the continental crust, perhaps for seeding clouds to form raindrops, and for moderating the climate so that wild swings of temperature are avoided. As a result of life, the behaviors of living things, this planet of ours is an entirely different kind of object than it would be if it was lifeless.
Most of this action is a byproduct of the chemical activities which take place within a cell, and there is no suggestion here that some sort of conspiracy took place among the spirochetes and the polyps to come up with all this but there is no denying that the world that has come about through their influence is a place more congenial to life than it was in the beginning.
In fact it became so congenial that a veritable explosion of life has occurred not only in the amount of inanimate material that is now either alive or of organic origin ready to be recycled again, but in the kaleidoscopic variety of life, far beyond the most vivid imagination. This amounts to a riot of invention. Even now researchers are being surprised by new and unbelievable discoveries.
Much of this explosive diversity seems to be due to the 'invention' of the eukaryote cell which seems to be linked to the 'invention' of sexuality. Researchers are constantly finding new ways living things have of exchanging genetic information. It could be that viruses and cancers are such methods. But with sexuality and a nucleus this exchange of what amounts to an accumulation of knowledge about experimental investigations. Death might also be thought of as another innovation that promoted the diversification of life forms. Bacteria are basically immortal because they proliferate by dividing. An individual bacteria can die but its clones continue on. Therefore the accumulation of 'knowledge' within the genetic apparatus is slow, although it now appears that interspecies exchanges of genetic code is more common than suspected. Sexual reproduction regularizes the exchange of genetic information which results in more rapid innovation. These innovations are more structural than chemical, or more accurately the chemistry of individual cells specializes. Both plants and animals have light sensitive cells, but plants use them to produce sugar and animals use them to see with. The whole story is available for examination, but what was already a difficult problem in Darwin's day has only grown more intractable as more information has been accumulated by scientists. At the time for instance, the idea of separate species didn't seem problematic. There were dogs, cats, apes, flies toadstools, and it was all perfectly straightforward except in certain unusual cases. The discovery of genetics seemed to simplify and resolve the questions of how, but does it? In animals, energy production is largely a function of mitochondria. Although enclosed within the nucleus mitochondria are actually separate organelles with their own genetic structures. Mitochondria more or less define what an animal is. Plants derive their energy from a different organelle, the chloroplast, which is able to convert sunlight into sugar, which can be metered out in the precise quantity needed by the plant for growth and reproduction. It is now thought that chloroplasts and mitochondria were originally independent entities which the precursors of plants and animals hijacked for their own use. There don't appear to be any free ranging mitochondria or chloroplasts roaming the oceans or the dry land nowadays. Question: do we use them for our benefit or do they use us for theirs? They may have started out as parasites or infections, and parasitism and infection are major issues for all living things, even us two legged geniuses. A recent type of parasitism recently observed is a fungus transmitted from cats to rodents. Harmless to cats, the fungus causes the rat or mouse to be attracted to the smell of cat piss. Could it be that those strange ladies living with hundreds of cats have contracted the same infection?
But not all parasitism is harmful. Sometimes it's entirely beneficial, in which case the relationship between host and guest is called symbiosis. As in the complex population of microbes living in our guts without which we would not be able to digest our food. Certain varieties of E. Coli perform these services for us, and it is well known that cows are only able to digest grasses with the help of microorganisms that convert otherwise indigestible cellulose into sugar. Neat trick. Without those bacteria cows would die out...and all that flatulence that so terrifies the econazis. But without cows to keep those grasses in check who knows what calamities would transpire. Sounds like a business opportunity for the Goracle. But for the purposes of this discussion, can cows be considered a species apart from the happy bacteria busily fermenting cellulose in all those bovine stomachs? And how is this explicable in terms of Darwinian theory? Cooperation, competition, parasitism leading to terrestrial transformation. Neat trick.
Here's an interesting factoid I read of not long ago. It had to do with fruit flies where the writer informed his readers that there is more genetic variation within one species of fruit flies than there is spread out among the entire order of mammalia. I have no reason to doubt this information since it was conveyed by someone who had spent his life studying cladistics, but if this is so then what exactly does genetics have to do with species- by which I will continue to mean dogs and cats and rats and so on.
I am asking all these questions not because I am trying to discredit the idea of evolution. I have no doubt it took place. But how? And what does it mean to our understanding of the universe, ourselves, God, art, time, and this strange experience of being alive?
Sunday, April 6, 2008
The Domains of Life
Not so long ago biologists had a nice and tidy classification system for life on earth. There was the animal kingdom and the vegetable kingdom and the only uncertainty was to which kingdom certain problematic life forms belonged. That's all changed. The new dividing line is between prokaryotes and eukaryotes, and more recently a third fork, the archaea, has been identified. These deepest roots of the tree of life classifications are now called domains. The domain archaea represents what are most likely the most ancient of organisms that thrive in all sorts of hellish environments, like next to undersea lava flows, in boiling geysers and deep in the bowels of the earth where pressures are so high that water won't boil no matter how hot the temperature. These archaea, until recently unknown, may be the largest component of earth's biomass. Interestingly, there are indications that we multicellular eukaryotes are more closely related to the archaea than to the more familiar bacteria that live on the surface of the earth. According to some theorists the archaea are survivors of journeys through interstellar space. The late Fred Hoyle believed life was ubiquitous throughout the universe and actually mediated star formation. He was a pioneering giant of cosmology who didn't believe in the Big Bang theory. In fact, he was the one who coined that expression. One of the reasons he came to this conclusion was that he didn't believe the Big Bang theory left enough time for the building blocks of organic life to arise through random processes. If the actuarial figures he quotes are correct no circumstance is imaginable in which even the enzymes that form the building blocks of life could have spontaneously come into existence. This may sound like a pretty radical idea, but he wasn't trying to be radical. He was trying to save the theory...the theory of a materialistic origin of life.
Other advocates of conventional evolution theory have also seen difficulties and tried to find ways out. The idea of a gradual accumulation of mutations is one of those difficulties and some writers think the discovery of homeobox genes solves the problem. The problem is this: major classes of life forms don't appear gradually in the fossil record but all at once. The naturalist Steven Jay Gould spent a career pondering this problem and proposed a theory called punctuated equilibrium, based on his study of the Burgess Shales. This is not a theory, it's a description, a word, a verbal shorthand for, "there are epochs in geologic history when the earth is dominated by one type of life form- such as dinosaurs- which suddenly end and another dominant life form suddenly explodes in numbers and diversity- such as mammals- occupying ecological spaces once occupied by the now defunct biological order." This completely undermines the theory, but the homeobox gene clusters at first glance seem to save the day. This is a type of gene that mediates the expression of the rest of the genetic activity of the organism, and it takes very few changes in the way homeobox genes transcribe genetic information to cause massive changes in the organism as a whole. It is a master gene set, an amplifier. They are found in multicellular life forms, in fact they are what make organized multicellular life possible. But how do the homeobox genes know when to kick into gear? We have had nearly two centuries of fairly meticulous observers who would have noticed if homeobox genes had a habit of suddenly going wild. Nevertheless it's a good thing to know, that any given creature can fairly quickly alter its form. If it needs to. But how does it know it needs to? How does it know that its adaptations for survival are no longer operable and need to be changed? How does it settle on a new set of blueprints? This is really what's necessary to save the theory of natural selection, which also is just terminology, like punctuated equilibrium, not really a respectable theory. Just because you've got a name for something it doesn't mean you understand it. Terminology is not explanation. Incidentally, the homeobox genes are the most conservative gene sets yet studied, being virtually identical in man and mouse, whose complement differs from fruit flies mainly in number.
Calling homeobox genes a set of blueprints may seem no more than metaphorical language but if they function like blueprints then maybe blueprints are a metaphor for homeobox genes. Metaphors are linguistic markers to help us understand the unfamiliar by likening it to the known. I like to use the abacus metaphor for the entire genetic concept. An abacus is used to do arithmetic. But an abacus is not arithmetic. Similarly, I think genes are used to do life but they are not life. I also like the metaphor of a movie. As an informed member of modern society you know that the movie unfolding before your eyes is the end product of a huge production apparatus. But there is in the movie itself no evidence of the existence of cameras, directors, writers, electricians, catering trucks, or investment deals. Materialists, whether scientific or hedonistic would have us believe there is nothing behind the smoke and mirrors of this weird thing called life and they can't bring themselves to acknowledge the possibility of an influence on our world that can't be learned from the physical facts discerible through the senses. Buddhists would have us believe that the material world is nothing but an illusion. Phenomenologists and post modernists don't believe in reality either. But I think they are all wrong.
I believe in evolution. It's funny to have to say it that way, like saying I believe in astrology. But there is no doubt in my mind that all life that we know of has a common ancestry and that from that theme this madcap world of ours took its present configuration. I am not the least bit offended by the idea that I'm related to a slime mold (as some have suggested) so the ape thing doesn't bother me at all. There may be variations of the currently accepted picture, such as the panspermia theory suggests.
But here's where I have a problem. It is said that between apes and humans there is only a few percent difference in genetic code separating us. That few percent has to carry quite a bit of freight. For instance, chimpanzees don't have a literature. They don't sit around campfires and tell funny stories about how great grandpa chimp stole a bunch of bananas from a mountain gorilla. Orang utans show no curiosity about the moon let alone do they scheme how to fly there. No Shakespeare, no Bible, no Euclid, no Rembrandt, no TV shows, no discernible effect on the climate, although they have been observed cheating, lying, stealing, killing and even having wars which proves to some that the apes are just like us. But generally they are the real noble savages in the estimation of the econazis who think humans are a blight on the earth.
Well, if those few differences on the DNA chain are sufficient to cause all the changes to the landscape caused by human agency then materialism has a lot of explaining to do.
Other advocates of conventional evolution theory have also seen difficulties and tried to find ways out. The idea of a gradual accumulation of mutations is one of those difficulties and some writers think the discovery of homeobox genes solves the problem. The problem is this: major classes of life forms don't appear gradually in the fossil record but all at once. The naturalist Steven Jay Gould spent a career pondering this problem and proposed a theory called punctuated equilibrium, based on his study of the Burgess Shales. This is not a theory, it's a description, a word, a verbal shorthand for, "there are epochs in geologic history when the earth is dominated by one type of life form- such as dinosaurs- which suddenly end and another dominant life form suddenly explodes in numbers and diversity- such as mammals- occupying ecological spaces once occupied by the now defunct biological order." This completely undermines the theory, but the homeobox gene clusters at first glance seem to save the day. This is a type of gene that mediates the expression of the rest of the genetic activity of the organism, and it takes very few changes in the way homeobox genes transcribe genetic information to cause massive changes in the organism as a whole. It is a master gene set, an amplifier. They are found in multicellular life forms, in fact they are what make organized multicellular life possible. But how do the homeobox genes know when to kick into gear? We have had nearly two centuries of fairly meticulous observers who would have noticed if homeobox genes had a habit of suddenly going wild. Nevertheless it's a good thing to know, that any given creature can fairly quickly alter its form. If it needs to. But how does it know it needs to? How does it know that its adaptations for survival are no longer operable and need to be changed? How does it settle on a new set of blueprints? This is really what's necessary to save the theory of natural selection, which also is just terminology, like punctuated equilibrium, not really a respectable theory. Just because you've got a name for something it doesn't mean you understand it. Terminology is not explanation. Incidentally, the homeobox genes are the most conservative gene sets yet studied, being virtually identical in man and mouse, whose complement differs from fruit flies mainly in number.
Calling homeobox genes a set of blueprints may seem no more than metaphorical language but if they function like blueprints then maybe blueprints are a metaphor for homeobox genes. Metaphors are linguistic markers to help us understand the unfamiliar by likening it to the known. I like to use the abacus metaphor for the entire genetic concept. An abacus is used to do arithmetic. But an abacus is not arithmetic. Similarly, I think genes are used to do life but they are not life. I also like the metaphor of a movie. As an informed member of modern society you know that the movie unfolding before your eyes is the end product of a huge production apparatus. But there is in the movie itself no evidence of the existence of cameras, directors, writers, electricians, catering trucks, or investment deals. Materialists, whether scientific or hedonistic would have us believe there is nothing behind the smoke and mirrors of this weird thing called life and they can't bring themselves to acknowledge the possibility of an influence on our world that can't be learned from the physical facts discerible through the senses. Buddhists would have us believe that the material world is nothing but an illusion. Phenomenologists and post modernists don't believe in reality either. But I think they are all wrong.
I believe in evolution. It's funny to have to say it that way, like saying I believe in astrology. But there is no doubt in my mind that all life that we know of has a common ancestry and that from that theme this madcap world of ours took its present configuration. I am not the least bit offended by the idea that I'm related to a slime mold (as some have suggested) so the ape thing doesn't bother me at all. There may be variations of the currently accepted picture, such as the panspermia theory suggests.
But here's where I have a problem. It is said that between apes and humans there is only a few percent difference in genetic code separating us. That few percent has to carry quite a bit of freight. For instance, chimpanzees don't have a literature. They don't sit around campfires and tell funny stories about how great grandpa chimp stole a bunch of bananas from a mountain gorilla. Orang utans show no curiosity about the moon let alone do they scheme how to fly there. No Shakespeare, no Bible, no Euclid, no Rembrandt, no TV shows, no discernible effect on the climate, although they have been observed cheating, lying, stealing, killing and even having wars which proves to some that the apes are just like us. But generally they are the real noble savages in the estimation of the econazis who think humans are a blight on the earth.
Well, if those few differences on the DNA chain are sufficient to cause all the changes to the landscape caused by human agency then materialism has a lot of explaining to do.
Monday, March 31, 2008
The universe as a great thought
For an entity to have volition it follows that that entity must need to perceive the existence of something external to itself. When Descartes made his famous formulation he concluded that it was the act of thinking itself that proved he existed, but I think feeling comes first. This means the ability to feel pain and pleasure, in order to have something to think about. You can think of just about anything but it's through pain and pleasure that reality intrudes. The cosmos isn't always what we want it to be. The universe has rules and in order to preserve its integrity a living entity must learn these rules. Moreover, we have wants, the first of which is we want to live. This is where thinking comes in. Or maybe you might want to call it adaptation. But if adaptation is an act of will, as I contend it is, then you might as well call it thinking.
Thinking also requires memory, since one of the first things that needs to be learnt is that the conditions in this external world, the source of those sensations of pain and pleasure, vary from place to place and over time. Genes are coded memories. When we think of evolution we think of dinosaurs, cockatoos, starfish and the myriads of life forms that exist or have existed. But geneticists, like the presocratic philosophers have come down with the opinion that life is reducible, not to water, or air, or earth, but to the gene, and that all these forms are variations on a theme of the capacity of the carbon element to form compounds with other elements If that's the case, then what exactly is the point of these myriads of life forms?
We are told that the process known as evolution is a mindless and mechanical affair of random and deterministic events, just like the formation of stars as clouds of hydrogen coalesce through the influence of gravity. For Darwinian evolutionists natural selection and random mutation are equivalent forces to gravity and the other elemental forces postulated by physicists. In other words, life is something that is acted upon. This is the clockwork theory of the universe, a cliche but apt. Clockwork, not meaning clock like, but something that is wound up and set loose, like a toy car, until it fizzles out.
But living things are anything but passive. They act upon their surroundings and change them. When you think about it from this point of view the universe is more like a great thought than a wind-up toy.
Thinking also requires memory, since one of the first things that needs to be learnt is that the conditions in this external world, the source of those sensations of pain and pleasure, vary from place to place and over time. Genes are coded memories. When we think of evolution we think of dinosaurs, cockatoos, starfish and the myriads of life forms that exist or have existed. But geneticists, like the presocratic philosophers have come down with the opinion that life is reducible, not to water, or air, or earth, but to the gene, and that all these forms are variations on a theme of the capacity of the carbon element to form compounds with other elements If that's the case, then what exactly is the point of these myriads of life forms?
We are told that the process known as evolution is a mindless and mechanical affair of random and deterministic events, just like the formation of stars as clouds of hydrogen coalesce through the influence of gravity. For Darwinian evolutionists natural selection and random mutation are equivalent forces to gravity and the other elemental forces postulated by physicists. In other words, life is something that is acted upon. This is the clockwork theory of the universe, a cliche but apt. Clockwork, not meaning clock like, but something that is wound up and set loose, like a toy car, until it fizzles out.
But living things are anything but passive. They act upon their surroundings and change them. When you think about it from this point of view the universe is more like a great thought than a wind-up toy.
Thursday, February 21, 2008
Stayin' Alive
If science is about the measurement and quantification of physical things, then what exactly is a species? A dog is a physical thing, but what about dog? What about mammal, or reptile, or tree, or star, or planet? Yes, we can see and measure individual dogs, snakes, elms, stars, trees, and we can see that these individual entities share certain features that distinguish them from other types of entities. Although individual dogs vary enormously in size, colour, shape, and many other characteristics, they all have other very definite things in common. Likewise any other class of things we can think of. And while it is certainly possible to reduce any given dog to its constituent components, whether to bones, fur, DNA, or atoms, it is clear that the generality 'dog' has no physical being whatsoever and is neither measurable nor perceptible to the senses. It is a concept, but a concept that manifests itself in physical things, as if some sort of invisible template lurks in the empyrean, a higher plane of existence than ours from which all individual things on earth are created.
Most of Plato's dialogs take place between Socrates and his friends, and for the most part his friends are pretty dumb. But in the Parmenides dialog Socrates defers to the older man. It's not an easy dialog to read, all about the logical problems associated with proving the existence of The One versus the Many. I take these terms to mean God and matter, and the discussion is interesting to me because the argument is based on logical reasoning, not as with modern scientific atheists on the evidence of the senses. The most stunning statement Parmenides makes is that The One is completely unaware of the created world.
The article on Parmenides in The Big View website states his view that, "...the senses deceive us and hence, our perception of the world does not reflect the world as it really is. Instead, the real world is something above our apprehension and can only be apprehended through logic." Phenomenologists have a similar analysis.
Not much of Parmenides' own writings survive. In them he seems preoccupied with proving the universe to be fundamentally one single thing. The reasoning is hard to follow and it's hard to be sure what he really meant, but Socrates/Plato was inspired by the problems presented by Parmenides' theory to make a dialog out of it where Socrates was left speechless. When he thought about these problems he wanted to "...run away, because I am afraid I might fall into a bottomless pit of nonsense, and perish..." I can sympathize.
When studying the physical world- plate tectonics, brownian motion, harmonics, levers or whatever, it's difficult enough. What does it all mean? Beyond a certain complexity calculations quickly become insoluble. Climatologists still can't predict the next day's weather. Newton's laws accurately describe the orbit of Mars around the sun, but the swarm of asteroids between Jupiter and Mars is a different thing, and the vast quantity of bodies outside the orbits of the planets are even more inscrutable. To tell the truth, as marvelous as the discoveries in physics have been, they only illuminate the simplest of phenomena. Nevertheless, the processes are pretty well understood. There may be a multitude of things to study, but one salient feature stands out: there is order in the universe. Things work the same on earth as in the stars. As far out as we can extend our perceptions, the same laws are observed.
And isn't it astounding that no matter how great the distance there is always something more. No matter what the scale there is always something larger, and there is always structure, order, form. The same is true when we look inward to the small. Only a few centuries ago scientists turned the lens from looking into the distance to looking at the tiny things found in a drop of pond water. And now we are able to show images on the molecular scale. Again, no matter how closely we look we find order, structure and form.
Since the onset of the scientific age we have accumulated more information than any one person can possibly absorb. Arcane theories of relativity and quantum mechanics unintelligible to the average person nevertheless make possible many of the technological marvels we have come to take for granted. But have we advanced in our understanding of the meaning behind these complex theories and what does all this information tell us about ourselves? How do we dig ourselves out from under this avalanche?
Maybe we could start by thinking about how living things differ from the inanimate things that are more amenable to scientific reasoning, more predictable in response to stimuli. Darwinists and geneticists have been determined to fit their theories ov evolution and inheritance into the same theoretical frameworks that have been so successful in the physical sciences. But the facts don't fit the theory.
This is the one fact I aam speaking of: living things behave in fundamentally different ways than inanimate things. Living things have volition. No matter how small or simple the organism, it has preferences. Unlike you or I, a rock would be indifferent to being unable to move at the bottom of a ditch filling with water.
Being alive is actually a great deal of trouble, with far more opportunities to experience pain than joy, and staying alive is an unrelenting struggle. Why do we put up with it? Albert Camus thought it was the only question that mattered.
Most of Plato's dialogs take place between Socrates and his friends, and for the most part his friends are pretty dumb. But in the Parmenides dialog Socrates defers to the older man. It's not an easy dialog to read, all about the logical problems associated with proving the existence of The One versus the Many. I take these terms to mean God and matter, and the discussion is interesting to me because the argument is based on logical reasoning, not as with modern scientific atheists on the evidence of the senses. The most stunning statement Parmenides makes is that The One is completely unaware of the created world.
The article on Parmenides in The Big View website states his view that, "...the senses deceive us and hence, our perception of the world does not reflect the world as it really is. Instead, the real world is something above our apprehension and can only be apprehended through logic." Phenomenologists have a similar analysis.
Not much of Parmenides' own writings survive. In them he seems preoccupied with proving the universe to be fundamentally one single thing. The reasoning is hard to follow and it's hard to be sure what he really meant, but Socrates/Plato was inspired by the problems presented by Parmenides' theory to make a dialog out of it where Socrates was left speechless. When he thought about these problems he wanted to "...run away, because I am afraid I might fall into a bottomless pit of nonsense, and perish..." I can sympathize.
When studying the physical world- plate tectonics, brownian motion, harmonics, levers or whatever, it's difficult enough. What does it all mean? Beyond a certain complexity calculations quickly become insoluble. Climatologists still can't predict the next day's weather. Newton's laws accurately describe the orbit of Mars around the sun, but the swarm of asteroids between Jupiter and Mars is a different thing, and the vast quantity of bodies outside the orbits of the planets are even more inscrutable. To tell the truth, as marvelous as the discoveries in physics have been, they only illuminate the simplest of phenomena. Nevertheless, the processes are pretty well understood. There may be a multitude of things to study, but one salient feature stands out: there is order in the universe. Things work the same on earth as in the stars. As far out as we can extend our perceptions, the same laws are observed.
And isn't it astounding that no matter how great the distance there is always something more. No matter what the scale there is always something larger, and there is always structure, order, form. The same is true when we look inward to the small. Only a few centuries ago scientists turned the lens from looking into the distance to looking at the tiny things found in a drop of pond water. And now we are able to show images on the molecular scale. Again, no matter how closely we look we find order, structure and form.
Since the onset of the scientific age we have accumulated more information than any one person can possibly absorb. Arcane theories of relativity and quantum mechanics unintelligible to the average person nevertheless make possible many of the technological marvels we have come to take for granted. But have we advanced in our understanding of the meaning behind these complex theories and what does all this information tell us about ourselves? How do we dig ourselves out from under this avalanche?
Maybe we could start by thinking about how living things differ from the inanimate things that are more amenable to scientific reasoning, more predictable in response to stimuli. Darwinists and geneticists have been determined to fit their theories ov evolution and inheritance into the same theoretical frameworks that have been so successful in the physical sciences. But the facts don't fit the theory.
This is the one fact I aam speaking of: living things behave in fundamentally different ways than inanimate things. Living things have volition. No matter how small or simple the organism, it has preferences. Unlike you or I, a rock would be indifferent to being unable to move at the bottom of a ditch filling with water.
Being alive is actually a great deal of trouble, with far more opportunities to experience pain than joy, and staying alive is an unrelenting struggle. Why do we put up with it? Albert Camus thought it was the only question that mattered.
Monday, February 11, 2008
Love and sex
"Every sensation, he says, is devoid of reason and incapable of memory; for neither is it self-caused nor, regarded as having an external cause, can it add anything thereto or take anything therefrom," is how Epicurus states his case. At first glance it seems to be true. "Hence it is from plain facts that we must draw inferences from the unknown...All our notions are derived from perceptions with some slight help from reasoning." These perceptions produce movements in the mind, or as logical positivists would have it, mind is a property of matter. Frankly, I think this formulation is a rather astounding claim for matter, but never mind. Since sensations are primary, it only follows that they are 'good,' and thus pleasure is logically the goal of living. Because it also follows from his logic that the objects of our perceptions (including our bodies) are the only realities, therefore at death our bodies revert to those minuscule, indestructible atoms, and the you that was vanishes like a puff of smoke.
Plato wasn't so sure that pleasure and sensation could be equated with good. "He who is the victim of his passions and the slave of pleasure will of course desire to make his beloved as agreeable to himself as possible," he expounded in the Phaedrus dialog. In other words when pleasure is equated with love, the lover will seek to dominate the beloved for the sake of the pleasure he derives from the beloved. Neither did he think that reality was reducible to matter: "The soul through all her being is immortal..." "...Only the self-moving, never leaving self, never ceases to move and is the fountain and beginning of motion to all that moves besides." For Epicurus the key to understanding the universe was matter, and for Plato it was energy...which he called the Psyche.
Noun and verb, as if you could have one without the other. Yet, in both philosophy and common belief, these are the two warring factions. Entire eras of our history can be defined in terms of these contrasting views. For many centuries Platonism ruled. It was made to order for the Christian era, without which that immense thought-structure could have had no logical justification. But in the last few centuries the ghost of Epicurus has seemingly vanquished Plato to the attic, along with old clocks, broken toys, 386 computers and all other outmoded items.
The dialectic even filters down to how Valentine's day is commemorated. In the bookstore last week two tables devoted to the occasion were set up so that you almost stumbled over them as you went through the entry. This is called marketing, but what was being marketed? Sex. Pleasure. The senses. One title I remember was "The Loin King." Ha ha. A book of sex coupons flanked it, illustrated editions of the Kama Sutra a little further down, etc. Nothing at all about love, unless you think that love is just a wishy washy synonym for sex. Curiously, the rear of the table is taken up with tomes of advice for losing weight. Because obviously if you are fat you're not going to do very well at the local pick up bar. So what happened to Valentines that used to promise love eternal, and yours alone? Why, these sentiments depend on an awareness of something nobler and higher than mere sex, something unexplainable in terms of the here and now, something that only makes sense if you believe in a transcendental constituent in the human make up: an immortal soul; something like what Plato tried to envision.
I'm not trying to make this into a diatribe on the morality of promiscuous sex. I would like instead to learn if there can be such a thing as morality, or honour, or love, or if these ideas really exist apart from the physicality of being. These are really tough questions, and they aren't just of academic interest as the Valentine's Day display showed. What we believe has a profound affect on how we organize our communities and how we live our individual private lives. For the most part, the general consensus since the 19 century has been that truth is only to be found in physical causes so that when a science of psychology was pioneered, the mind was entirely ignored. A generation of behavioral psychologists pretended it didn't exist, a philosophy that was made to order for the nazis and the bolsheviks. Observation of behavior was expected to reveal all. As the study of genetics advanced behaviorism of the whole creature was superseded by the study of the behaviors of certain complex carbon-based molecules. There is no doubt at all among geneticists that all behaviors of living things can be explained through DNA.
I don't mean in any way to disparage the work of geneticists, with one major caveat. They want to believe life can be treated like any other scientific concept. That's why an embryo is nothing more to them than a mass of inert tissue to be poked and prodded, experimented on, and disposed of just like any other chemical broth. In molecular biology scientists have found their own atomism and have joined the ranks of nuclear physicists as hard scientists. The knowledge they have added to our civilizational bank is immense. But I think that in contemplating the mystery of life and consciousness that we are led to an entirely different conclusion. Living things are not mere assemblages of chemical constituents. Life is different. And maybe by contemplating these mysteries of life and consciousness we might end up discovering entirely new worlds of thought and understanding, maybe even new science. And it amazes me that Plato and Parmenides discerned the implications of these questions over 2000 years ago. I think the careful observations of generations of students since then has only added to the mystery because they do not point to a materialistic origin of being.
Plato wasn't so sure that pleasure and sensation could be equated with good. "He who is the victim of his passions and the slave of pleasure will of course desire to make his beloved as agreeable to himself as possible," he expounded in the Phaedrus dialog. In other words when pleasure is equated with love, the lover will seek to dominate the beloved for the sake of the pleasure he derives from the beloved. Neither did he think that reality was reducible to matter: "The soul through all her being is immortal..." "...Only the self-moving, never leaving self, never ceases to move and is the fountain and beginning of motion to all that moves besides." For Epicurus the key to understanding the universe was matter, and for Plato it was energy...which he called the Psyche.
Noun and verb, as if you could have one without the other. Yet, in both philosophy and common belief, these are the two warring factions. Entire eras of our history can be defined in terms of these contrasting views. For many centuries Platonism ruled. It was made to order for the Christian era, without which that immense thought-structure could have had no logical justification. But in the last few centuries the ghost of Epicurus has seemingly vanquished Plato to the attic, along with old clocks, broken toys, 386 computers and all other outmoded items.
The dialectic even filters down to how Valentine's day is commemorated. In the bookstore last week two tables devoted to the occasion were set up so that you almost stumbled over them as you went through the entry. This is called marketing, but what was being marketed? Sex. Pleasure. The senses. One title I remember was "The Loin King." Ha ha. A book of sex coupons flanked it, illustrated editions of the Kama Sutra a little further down, etc. Nothing at all about love, unless you think that love is just a wishy washy synonym for sex. Curiously, the rear of the table is taken up with tomes of advice for losing weight. Because obviously if you are fat you're not going to do very well at the local pick up bar. So what happened to Valentines that used to promise love eternal, and yours alone? Why, these sentiments depend on an awareness of something nobler and higher than mere sex, something unexplainable in terms of the here and now, something that only makes sense if you believe in a transcendental constituent in the human make up: an immortal soul; something like what Plato tried to envision.
I'm not trying to make this into a diatribe on the morality of promiscuous sex. I would like instead to learn if there can be such a thing as morality, or honour, or love, or if these ideas really exist apart from the physicality of being. These are really tough questions, and they aren't just of academic interest as the Valentine's Day display showed. What we believe has a profound affect on how we organize our communities and how we live our individual private lives. For the most part, the general consensus since the 19 century has been that truth is only to be found in physical causes so that when a science of psychology was pioneered, the mind was entirely ignored. A generation of behavioral psychologists pretended it didn't exist, a philosophy that was made to order for the nazis and the bolsheviks. Observation of behavior was expected to reveal all. As the study of genetics advanced behaviorism of the whole creature was superseded by the study of the behaviors of certain complex carbon-based molecules. There is no doubt at all among geneticists that all behaviors of living things can be explained through DNA.
I don't mean in any way to disparage the work of geneticists, with one major caveat. They want to believe life can be treated like any other scientific concept. That's why an embryo is nothing more to them than a mass of inert tissue to be poked and prodded, experimented on, and disposed of just like any other chemical broth. In molecular biology scientists have found their own atomism and have joined the ranks of nuclear physicists as hard scientists. The knowledge they have added to our civilizational bank is immense. But I think that in contemplating the mystery of life and consciousness that we are led to an entirely different conclusion. Living things are not mere assemblages of chemical constituents. Life is different. And maybe by contemplating these mysteries of life and consciousness we might end up discovering entirely new worlds of thought and understanding, maybe even new science. And it amazes me that Plato and Parmenides discerned the implications of these questions over 2000 years ago. I think the careful observations of generations of students since then has only added to the mystery because they do not point to a materialistic origin of being.
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Epicurus vs Plato
The philosophical justifications for scientific atheism in our tradition go back to the Epicureans. The Epicureans introduced us to the idea of atomism, which proposes that all matter is reducible to infinitesimally tiny particles they called atoms. I've always been curious as to what logical path led them to this conclusion, because it was a brilliant insight. We think of Epicureans now as being people who like to eat well and live the good life but it was originally a school of philosophy named after Epicurus who founded it. It would be a pleasant sojourn to digress into the history behind the idea but this blog isn't primarily concerned with history. Neither is it meant to be scholarly. What I want to do is extract some of the fundamental ideas that shape our culture and one of the main threads originates with the Epicureans which is a good thing to know.
In essence the Epicureans claimed that the only valid knowledge possible comes through the senses. Everything else in their thinking proceeded from this premise, and it ultimately led to the assertion that pleasure was the most important goal a man could strive for. One might ask how they could be sure, since the argument itself is an example of reasoning, not something that can be known through the senses. I'll give them a little slack, though, because it's been a pretty productive axiom upon which to build a sound observational science.
But science would also be impossible without reason, especially the highly abstract form of reasoning known as mathematics. According to tradition Epicurus was born seven years after the death of Plato, and Plato had an entirely different idea that was probably based on his thoughts on geometry. Geometry and philosophy were popular hobbies among the Greek leisure class of his day. The essential thing that Plato noticed about geometry was that it didn't depend on sensory input. In fact there is no such thing as a line, or a point or a triangle in the real world. And how do we know that a square plus b square equals c square? We know these things because we have the power of reasoning. But what is reasoning? Plato theorized that there was a kind of invisible, purer than earthly light, the light of pure reason, corresponding to the light that let's us see things in our sensual world, that illuminated our minds. This was how we were able to reason.
And ever since then there has been an antagonism between the two conceptions of reality, an antagonism that manifests itself in numerous controversies, but right now I would like to draw attention to these two theories of knowledge, and suggest that this is not an exhaustive list. There are other ways we have of knowing.
A third way of knowing was introduced to western thinking when the Graeco-Roman world came up against a group of Semites which occupied Judea. These Jews worshiped an omnipotent, omniscient, immortal deity, a creator of the entire universe who was not contained within the existence we humans know. This deity could not be seen by us, although in times past he had appeared to various prophets and ancestors; records of these visitations were kept by a priestly class which which arbitrated various rituals, practices, laws of behavior. If the god could not be seen, if the god presided over creation in some ethereal universe beyond the reach of our senses, then how could his existence be known? Through faith, a concept that grew to dominate human thinking for the next 2000 years.
One more way of knowing is the way of the artist, poet, composer, architect, even the philosopher and the scientist: the imagination. Imagination is the faculty we use when we wish to bring something new into the world. A song, a sculpture, a story, an airplane, a theory.
The present day theory of science privileges the senses and reason over imagination and faith. Faith is considered an outmoded, discredited form of ignorance rather than knowledge. Scientific theories are logical constructs that are validated by an appeal to the senses... observations, in other words. This is as true of simple mechanical calculations as it is of quantum theory.
While science is wildly successful at manipulating the forces that make it possible to send a rocket to the moon or develop strains of rice and wheat that are productive enough to feed our billions, it has been less successful at ordering human society. In fact, attempts to scientize social structures, as with the bolsheviks and the fascists who have caused more human destruction and misery than any previous dogmatics in human history.
The poor artists don't know what to do. If there is one segment of endeavor which has been decimated by the materialistic doctrines of scientific atheism more than religious institutions it is art. Without belief in transcendent reality then the artist has no idea where his impulse to create comes from, and so he turns to death. It is what he sees, and it is what he portrays in modern art. No longer can he see the transcendent in everyday things and activities. Instead of heroism he sees brutality. Instead of showing the beauties of the human form he tears it apart and reassembles it in grotesque ways. This is self mutilation. The sad little golem I photographed could not be a clearer expression of 'A portrait of the artist as a dead man.'
We live in an age of terrible demoralization. But why? And is there any way out? What if there has been some terrible misunderstanding? I think there has been. And although I don't claim to know all the answers I think I can raise some good questions and point to a new direction. God help me.
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