The Answer to Chickens and Eggs
One regret I have regarding the demise of Uncommon Descent is being unable to continue discussion with Upright Biped, a regular at UD who believed he had an argument against the natural evolution of the genetic code, which I refer to as his “semiotic hypothesis”.
Whilst wrapped up in impenetrable jargon and idiosyncratic prose, it is/was quite a simple argument: that the first organisms could not evolve the genetic code without already having the metabolism in place and vice versa, an insoluble chicken-and-egg conundrum.
Upright Biped first publicized his idea in 2011, and it was the subject of an OP by Elizabeth Liddle (owner of this site) in October 2011.
I didn’t get involved much at the time, as discussion seemed to stick at the semiotics, whereas I thought Upright Biped’s best point was it would be impossible for a genetic storage system to evolve prior to metabolism and equally for heritable metabolic pathways to evolve without a genetic storage system. A classical chicken and egg issue.
In 2005, I encountered the late Robert Shapiro (over his alleged peer review of Mike Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box) who was a sceptic on RNA World, and he influenced me to adopt the same view. Anyway, Upright Biped continued sporadically to promote his idea at Uncommon Descent and elsewhere without much success, yet I thought the “which first, genetic code or metabolism” conundrum was a strong argument.
Not least due to the input from erstwhile TSZ regular, Allan Miller, I have since changed my mind about RNA World and now find it a plausible idea, and there is more and increasing evidentiary support for RNA World than I knew of in 2005 and 2011.
The brilliant thing about RNA World is that RNA can act as a gene, in that it can and does act as a template for replication and also RNA is capable of being a catalyst, a ribozyme, the RNA equivalent of a protein enzyme. Indeed, RNA is the catalytic heart of cellular metabolic “machinery” that synthesizes proteins, the ribosome. No chickens and no eggs, and critically, no genetic code needed.
I should put in a word for Nick Lane here, whose UCL research group have published many papers on the origin of life from a biochemical standpoint. I recently bought his book, Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death, which I recommend as a good summary of the current state of play without being overly technical. There’s a good video of a recent talk here for a recent overview.
I’ve contributed a fair few comments to Uncommon Descent over the years, and been banned a few times, culminating in my disappearance under the pseudonym, Aurelio Smith, back in 2015, since when I’d been content to lurk until, last year I noticed Upright Biped addressing comments to an ID sceptic, JVL, promoting his semiotic argument again. JVL is a mathematician and Upright Biped seemed to have fixated on JVL to the extent of harassing him. So I registered under the pseudonym, Fred Hickson, and added my 2¢.
Unfortunately, force majeure has prevented the discussion with Upright Biped continuing so I hope he’ll consider joining us here.
High complexity requires a creator. Infinite complexity does not.
Simple.
Yeah. Do you have any evidence that there was something else present? I mean we can take a look at cosmic history here. Molecules are made up of atoms, and atoms of which the molecules of life are made, are produced in the cores of collapsing stars.
That means at some point any theory for life’s origins has to start simple, because we already know beyond any reasonably doubt that at some point in the past, there was only simpler things. A time before even single mino acids, or nucleobases. A time when every atom in your body was in the core of a star.
Exactly how complex those molecules got between the period when those stars still burned, the Earth formed, and life eventually evolved, is an open question. What isn’t an open question is that at some point things were much simpler.
I’m sorry but the simple-to-complex history of molecules is just not something that can be rationally disputed. If you do so you have a problem not just with chemistry and biology, but with physics and astronomy.
Because it’s incomprehensible gibberish, and there’s zero evidence in support of it.
A fair comment. I think they are both good questions if they lead us to think critically about what researchers have uncovered about this topic.
Yes we have good detailed knowledge about the physics and chemistry associated with lightning, or tornadoes, or volcanoes, or the sun rising and setting. But that does not mean out knowledge of these phenomena is complete. We know everything about the physics and chemistry of every publication of “The Origin of the Species”, but does this give us complete knowledge of it? Physics and chemistry does not exhaust the information contained in these writings.
From a Goethean perspective, analyzing the natural world provides us with the details of the script of nature. Being able to read this script provides true meaning.
Likewise positing proto-life emerging in higher states of matter does not necessitate appealing to “super-natural” causes. It might lead a person to that conclusion, but it isn’t a necessity.
I can agree with you here. Some external deity tweaking our experiential reality is not something I could or would believe in.
I have no problem with “simple to complex” being part of the story. After all we look at our development as individuals and we see that we have grown from a single cell to become multicellular, very complex organisms.
But how simple is even a single molecule. It is composed of fundamental “particles” which are not just “particles”. They are, (I shouldn’t even call them focal points), situated between the infinity of the point and the infinity of the plane. I have been taught to think of them as point-like, but I now consider them in their polar nature. Separate but unified in their higher aspect.
The realm of our senses is a particulate world of objects in space. But we also inhabit a world in which we are surrounded by fields and vibrating waves which we are not normally directly conscious of.
Yes, from what we know of the laws of physics and chemistry there is no answer to why there should be consciousness, or why creators with foresight should exist.
Consciousness is what is going on in our heads, brain activity, thinking. This process is taking place in a physical substrate. Independent of that, it does not exist.
How do you know that? What exactly do you mean by “the laws of physics and chemistry”?
Yes, that was funny coming from a guy that believes in “evolution” and about a girl that believes in “evolution” and super determinism. Especially this bit :
“Though she would allow you to believe anything you want to, as long as your belief is at least consistent with what we know about science, she will remind you whenever there is no evidence in favor of your belief.”
I suppose her criticizing Dawkins and other such pompous frauds compensates some of her own brain stains.
This is dogmatism.
Contrast your statements with those of the physicist, Julian Barbour. When asked about consciousness, he uses phrases such as “I believe”, “It’s possible”, “I suspect”, it’s “my feeling”.
I don’t believe it can be doubted that consciousness exists. After all, I must be conscious in order to have beliefs in the first place. Our senses take in vastly more than we are aware of, and the vast majority of brain activity does not correlate to consciousness. I am aware of my thinking, feeling and willing. At what level are my sense inputs filtered to give me limited awareness and control over of these three features of my being? It is through my ego that this awareness arises, and to attribute it to brain activity is to add an additional step that I think unnecessary. I have a body and brain, but I am. And I can know directly that I am without speculating further about my relationship to the material of my body. My thinking ego is the fundamental focal point from which to begin acquiring conscious knowledge of any brain activity within my skull, and even having near certain knowledge that there is actually a brain inside my skull.
CharlieM: This is dogmatism.
It’s based on plenty of empirical research over many years. Sure, I cannot be absolutely certain that there is something else going in but there is nothing to suggest that brain activity is not sufficient in itself to explain minds and consciousness.
You are invited to point me to some, if you want.
There is no satisfactory answer within physics or chemistry that I know of. Perhaps you can provide one that will convince me.
i suppose you could include these things within physics and chemistry, if you were to include psychology and philosophy as branches of those sciences.
Maybe you should ask Alan Fox how he knows that, “consciousness is what is going on in our heads, brain activity, thinking. This process is taking place in a physical substrate. Independent of that, it does not exist.”
What else does there need to be? What else could that be? Numerous empirical examples exist of brain activity corresponding with thinking and numerous examples exist of brain impairment causing thinking impairment. There is no evidence that consciousness (thinking) is happening elsewhere, either inside or outside of living bodies. And when brains die, thinking stops.
Yes there is. Foresight, planning, prediction, predicting the consequences of our actions; selecting actions based on those predictions in relation to goals, awareness of oneself in relation to others, and others in relation to ourselves, are all things that many living organisms, especially animals, extra-especially mammals and to an extraordinary degree in humans, are all required for those creatures to thrive i.e. they are selectable capacities.
And we know a fair bit about the “physics and chemistry” involved in those capacities.
Absolutely psychology is a “branch” of those sciences, or rather, like biology, it is a science predicated on the laws of physics and chemistry.
It’s an empirical field, and indeed a branch of biology.
CharlieM,
I was asking you what you mean by “the laws of physics and chemistry”.
In my experience, people who use that phrase rarely know much about physics or chemistry, and they are almost always vague about what they mean by a law.
I would take issue with this — or not, depending on how the details are worked out.
It’s one thing to say that physics constrains chemistry, and that chemistry constrains biology, and that biology constrains psychology (for now).
We can take this to mean that nothing can happen in chemistry that violates what is physically possible, that nothing can happen in biology that violates what is chemically and physically possible, etc.
But while it is one thing to say that biology and psychology are constrained by and enabled by what is physically and chemically possible, it is quite different to suggest that vital and mental phenomena are entailed by the “laws” of physics and chemistry.
(I put “laws” in scare quotes because in fact a great deal of physics and chemistry does not involve laws, and there’s a good deal of active discussion among scientists and philosophers about what laws even are or if they even exist — and if so, in what sense.)
It is a distinction between whether autopoietic, teleodynamic processes are predictable from the second law of thermodynamics (and of course they aren’t) or whether they involve a violation of the second law of thermodynamics (and of course they don’t).
What would be needed here is an account of how one level of reality can emerge from another level without being reducible to or predictable from that level, but with a metaphysics of emergence that specifies precisely what kind of mechanistic explanations allow for emergent phenomena.
(Philosophy, it should be stressed, is not an empirical science at all, and has a quite different relation to the empirical sciences than the empirical sciences have to each other.)
Well as you noted, I steered clear of any claims about philosophy!
Perhaps I used the word “predicated” imprecisely!
I would agree absolutely that we don’t have “laws” that predict psychology in the sense that (perhaps) we have “laws” that make predictions much more precise in physics, and even chemistry.
But, for the very reasons you give, I don’t think that makes psychology fundamentally unlike, or even unconstrained, by physics, or chemistry. There are plenty of systems, including non-living systems (turbulence for instance – weather being the poster child) that are not “predictable” in terms of “laws”, because they are indeed emergent phenomena.
I don’t think there’s anything very mysterious about that – a tornado is unpredictable but nobody suggest (well not in this era) that tornados emerge from anything other than the same fundamental “laws” that underlie the rest of reality.
Which is all somewhat tangential to my point to Charlie in my previous comment, but interesting all the same!
I would say, extending on this notion, that basically nothing in biology is “entailed by” chemistry and physics, in the same sense that works of literature are not “entailed by” the nature of any language or vocabulary.
The world as we know it approaches an infinity of phenomena made possible by physics and chemistry and energy, but I wonder if we could point to any detail and say that it couldn’t have turned out differently – or will continue to work out differently going forward. As Yogi is credited with saying, prediction is hard, especially about the future.
I work a lot with physicists (brain imagers) who talk about leaving “the squishy bit” to us psychologists.
It’s a kind of faux modesty (“we are just simple physicists”) but there’s hint of the idea that psychology is “soft” science unlike the “hard” (non-squish!) science of physics.
I tend to retort that psychology is only “soft” because it’s so much more complicated – their science is so simple that their signal to noise is pretty high! Most of what they are measuring is signal, and most of the noise is measurement error, which they can control because they know where it’s coming from. So they can afford to be smug and only claim a “discovery” if they hit six sigma.
Whereas in psychology we are happy if we make two sigma, not because we are squish but because there’s so much “noise” in our signal from all the perfectly real factors that we didn’t actually measure because there are so many of them and measuring them is fraught with noise because our proxy measures are things like what people decide to tell us or how they behave on average over a gazillion trials.
I’m sure you are aware of the works of Dean Radin. He contrasts two main theories. The first is the neuroscience theory which is based on mechanistic materialism, and the second is that consciousness is fundamental in some way.
It’s obvious which theory each of us is drawn to. I don’t see why you shouldn’t believe in the former theory if you are satisfied with it. For personal and other reasons, such as the publications of Radin, I am not satisfied with that theory.
But, even if I argue against the mechanistic materialistic theory, I don’t think either theory should be dismissed out of hand.
Have you ever experienced brain death?
My body is the means by which I become conscious of the external world, but consciousness itself is not confined to time and space in the same way as my body is.
How did those ‘selectable’ capacities arise in the first place?
It may be poorly developed, but I have developed the capacity for creative writing. Can you provide some details of the physics and chemistry involved in these endeavours of mine? Are all the inspired and inspirational works of poets, composers and artists throughout history nothing but the movements of molecules within their bodies?
That is a different question, and not specific to capacities related to consciousness. So the answer is the same to both: by heritable variation in features that affect the organisms chance of leaving viable offspring.
We can’t ever know precisely which pathways led to any specific outcome, any more than we can know precisely which pathways led to the position of this boulder at the bottom of this cliff, because there are more possible pathways than the information in the end state allows us to construct. But we don’t have to infer that the boulder must therefore not have fallen from the cliff.
Some details. but not enough, because the capacity is the property of a system, not of the fundamental parts and particles that make up the system.
And yes, the inspirational work of poets etc IS far more than the “movement of molecules within their bodies”. Of course it is. The capacity to inspire is not a property of moving molecules. Its the property of the system of moving molecules (and ions btw).
Another analogy: a tornado is “more than the movement of molecules within the tornado”. It has properties that those molecules DO NOT HAVE. The properties of the tornado are properties of THE SYSTEM not properties of the molecules.
A system is MORE than the sum of its parts. It has properties that the parts do not possess. That doesn’t mean that if you take away the parts you will have something else left. You won’t. But by taking away the parts you will have destroyed the system that possessed the properties you were interested in.
I’m sure you have much more expertise in psychology than I do, but I would say that while both psychology and biology are the study of organisms, psychology has more to do with individuality while biology is more general. But neither can be understood through physics and chemistry alone. In my opinion physics, chemistry and psychology, although separate sciences, should inform each other.
Psychology taken to mean study of the soul or psyche, brings us to the same old argument about the nature of the soul.
There is a long thread, here which began by discussing this very topic. I’m sure these recent posts are more suited to that thread, or even a fresh thread. The op. there provided a quote by James Hillman, a defender of the soul. In this talk, he says:
and
Obviously I don’t regard psychology as routed in physics/chemistry, and I regard philosophy as something that anybody who is sincerely searching for knowledge, scientific or otherwise, should partake in. I think it would be a good thing if every scientist were also a philosopher.
No (though bits of mine have been dying off recently). What I have experienced is anaesthesia and waking up from it without any impression of passage of time; it’s not the same as waking from sleep.
We can call them habits if you like, but I was talking about regularities that have been observed and measured to be consistent. Things such as Newtons laws, inverse square laws, things that can be repeated by experiment, that sort of thing.
How do you think we get from physics/chemistry to forethought or conscious creativity? This is a complete mystery without first solving the origin of life question. And that is far from being achieved by academia.
You seem to be confusing the paint with the painting. All paintings are composed of paint, this is the physical substrate. Yet all paintings are different, and will always be different. The picture is, in the words of KN, enabled by but not entailed by the paint. When you admire a painting, you’re admiring the picture and not the materials, but without the materials there could be no picture.
And consciousness is all about prediction.
Laws are not just descriptions of regularities — they are idealizations and abstractions of described regularities, where the idealization and abstraction is in the service of determining the precise mathematical relationship between variables, together with techniques for determining the value of those variables through measurements.
I think that this way of regarding laws helps us understand why there seem to be more laws in physics and in chemistry than in biology, psychology, or sociology: because the idealizations and abstractions are less distorting (and hence more useful) in simple systems. As systems become more complex, there’s a growing problem of how to justify any idealization and abstraction in a non-arbitrary way. And so talking of laws becomes increasingly hopeless.
Getting from “physics/chemistry” to “forethought or conscious creativity” is not a problem that I recognize.
Firstly, there’s a tendency to conflate physics and chemistry — perhaps by virtue of the existence of laws in both? — even though they are very different sciences.
Secondly, most of the time people use the word “physics” when they really mean “fundamental physics”. (They are not too concerned with fluid dynamics or turbulence.)
Thirdly, we do not have — and we know no way of attaining — a single theory of fundamental physics. This means that we are doomed to a plurality — indeed, an logically contradictory plurality — of theories of fundamental physics. Each theory purports to a theory of the whole, but they cannot be — not unless the whole of physical reality is contradictory. (This would perhaps please the Hegelians.)
So, the question of how to go from physics to biology is just ill-formed. It’s too vague to be a meaningful, interesting problem.
As I see it, though, one question that might be posed is, “might we need to revise our understanding of the very nature of physical change in order to understand how biologically autonomous agency can emerge from thermodynamics under specific conditions?”
My own view, from reading Deacon’s unfortunately lengthy and garrulous Incomplete Nature, is that the answer to that question is “yes”.
Really? What do you think would need to change?
Revise from what? I’d say quantum theory is a rather radical revision of prior understanding of physical change.
Not convinced quantum models are required to account for biological autonomous agency.
I mean, obviously if reality is quantum then so is biology – I just don’t think autonomy rests on quantum phenomena.
If there’s a relevant theory it’s the theory of non-linear feedback systems.
I don’t feel a burning need to go into the details of Deacon’s very weird, extremely speculative account of emergence.
The gist of his account — and it’s tricky, in part because he uses lots of neologisms — is that a far-from-equilibrium thermodynamic system will tend to deplete the energetic and material reserves over time unless it were coupled to another far-from-equilibrium thermodynamic system that tends to build up the resources being used by the first system, and the byproducts of the first system tend to build up the resources being used by the second system.
(Put otherwise, what’s needed is not just one nonlinear feedback system but at least two, each of which prevents the other from depleting the resources that are necessary for sustaining the system at far from thermodynamic equilibrium.)
In such an idealized case as two (or more) coupled far-from-equilibrium systems, what emerges is a kind of system that Deacon calls “teleodynamic”. The simplest kind of teleodynamic system is a toy model that he calls “the autogen” (short for autogenic virus). It’s vastly simpler than even the simplest bacterial cell that we know of, but Deacon thinks it’s a plausible intermediary between far-from-equilibrium systems involving complex molecules and life in a recognizable sense.
Anyway, it’s vastly speculative and hasn’t yet been experimentally tested. I think it’s definitely on the right track, in terms of how to think about the metaphysics of emergence as grounded in a materialist dialectics.
Yes, there are ‘laws’ of physics through which we can determine the general behaviour of objects such as rocks.
And we can also look at the evidence for life’s evolutionary trajectory up to this point. As Simon Conway Morris has pointed out there are observable overall trends in the path life has taken. Some forms remain at the single celled stage, others develop multicellularity. Forms of organisms began to free themselves from constraining environments. There is a general trend towards higher levels of sentience, and among vertebrates an increase in manipulative skills which opens the way for individual creativity. Over geological time creatures which originally had very limited sentience have become conscious creators.
How much further will our creative abilities take us if we don’t destroy ourselves in the process?
The properties of tornadoes can be compared to the swirling eddies of blood within the cardiovascular system.
And there is no living being that is not in every moment of its existence a whole system. Parts are not added to it as in the manufacture of a machine. Organisms always contain the parts they need for their continued survival. And they develop into future by producing novel features out of themselves while maintaining their wholeness throughout. No tissue or organ has any meaningful existence separate from the whole organism.
Of course a person could have been experiencing some sort of transient consciousness during periods of anaesthesia, but they don’t any memory of this. How much of our experiences do we retain in consciousness? Very little I believe. Forgetting is a vital part of anyone being able to function in any way the would be considered normal.
All organisms are composed of polymers, this is the physical substrate. Yet all organisms are different, and will always be different. The organism is, in the words of KN, enabled by but not entailed by the polymers. When you admire an organism, you’re admiring the creature and not the materials, but without the materials there could be no creature. 🙂
Speculation. How would we know?
Henrietta Lacks might have disagreed.
I had surgery under twilight sleep. Long time ago, but I remember the dreams.
At some point they added drugs to block memory formation.
I did not know twilight sleep was a thing.
Though my best experience of morphine was also when I was much younger. I was in hospital overnight after surgery to repair a sliced shin and the nurse asked if I needed a painkiller. I said I was fine but she said I should accept the offer as the surgeon had prescribed morphine.
Me: OK then.
Me (later): Oh wow!
You question is certainly a legitimate one to ask. That is, as long as one assumes that thermodynamics can be the source which gives rise to autonomous agency.
Of course there are other assumptions we can to start from. Agency and physical processes might have always existed together as a unity. They emerge together. Or agency might be that which gives rise to and underlies physical processes. The physical world might have emerged from agency that is inaccessible to the recognized human senses.
I could be wrong, and doing him an injustice, but Deacon seems to be trying to overcome Cartesian dualism by the means of the physical sciences which are steeped in that dualism. An ‘onlooker consciousness’, observing ‘objective’ nature from a seemingly external vantage point. ‘Me, in here, observing a world, out there.’
Yes, I’m speculating. I do know that I dream and the vast majority of my dreams are not retained in my consciousness, if they ever reach my consciousness in the first place.
I haven’t looked into it but regression through hypnosis might shed some light on consciousness during anaesthesia.
As far as I know each and every one of those extant cells would not exist without the prior existence of Henrietta Lacks. She has given them their historical meaning.
Deacon does intend to overcome Cartesian dualism, but he does so from both sides: on the one hand, he rejects the Cartesian conception of the mental as disembodied spectator of mental states (including sensory states). On the other hand, he rejects the Cartesian conception of the physical as explainable entirely in terms of passive mechanism.
In cases like these I prefer to adopt the Goethean method and remain within the observation. If Alan has no recollections or sense of passage of time, then he simply wasn’t there. Mechanistic accounts and hypotheses aren’t required when things can be observed directly.
I think I might be wrong with my terminology. What I had was an ether drip. Kind of primitive, but it was 1955.
Ether had been used as a recreational drug that induced hallucinations. I had some lulus. As I said, I still have a visceral and vivid visual memory of floating in space amidst colorful vortices. Later in life my contemporaries were doing LSD, and I felt like I had been there, done that.
In old age I have vivid dreams, which I remember on waking. All this impacts my understanding of consciousness. I also have the testimony of a schizophrenic nephew who argued that his hallucinations were as valid as everyone else’s reality.
I’m pretty comfortable in thinking I can distinguish between dreams and reality, but I wouldn’t want to argue the case. Sometimes when I wake up in the middle of a vivid dream, I ask myself, did I suspect I was dreaming while I was dreaming. So far, the answer has always been no.
I think you touch on an important point here. My own take is that memory is intrinsic to conciouness. In fact, I would go so far as to say that “consciousness” isn’t something we “have” (or concious something we “are”) but something we do – and to make sense of it it needs an object – what are we conscious OF?
And much of the time what are conscious OF is not just the present, but how it relates to memories of the past. So we might be conscious of the present (and even of the past) during a lucid period under anaesthetic, but on “waking” we are not conscious of that conscious period – and it may remain permanently inaccessible to our “consciousness”, or, as I would prefer to term it “our conscious awareness”, though it may leave a trace in the way we react or behave.
I would say he is using the methods of contemporary natural science, which comes from within an ‘onlooker consciousness’. This stems from the dualistic Res extensa and res cogitans of Descartes which is difficult to escape from. But from my very limited reading of his works I do think he makes some valid and interesting points.
He also asks some interesting questions, such as:
How can the non-physical, ‘something’ that is missing any physical attributes, affect the physical? Isn’t that what he’s asking?
But if you had been present observing Alan when he was in that state, would he have been there? I think you would be safe in assuming that at least his living body was present even if his mind did not have its usual connection to his senses. 🙂