In origin-of-life experiment, cooperative molecules win out
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
It's easy to put a dogma on them, just as it's as easy to dismiss supernatural explanations just because they're supernatural (although metaphysically plausible).
But it strikes me just how hard the scientific community is trying to find a very particular kind of explanation in order to dismiss others: mind is the brain, life is just self-replicating molecules.
The two main approaches are "replicator-first" and "metabolism-first", though the replicators seem to do better in the popular press. I did my doctoral work in this field, and I was in the metabolism camp along with many of the major scientists working on the problem.
In a nutshell, "metabolism-first" means that a network of many interacting molecules were changing their local environment, eventually creating various feedback cycles that amplified the effect. Meaningful replication (especially of the RNA/DNA "informational polymer" variety) likely came significantly later, and almost certainly after the metabolic system had already achieved a basic state of homeostasis.
It was likely an evolutionary advancement of the "metabolic system" to use molecules like RNA (if not RNA itself, initially) to establish a more robust homeostasis by encoding information about the system in a more stable form.
A good argument for why the "mind is the brain": http://lesswrong.com/lw/p7/zombies_zombies/
Supernatural explanations can be and are (sometimes) wrong. If someone says that this or that supernatural phenomenon took place, and it didn't, then their statement is false.
If I tell you that a certain rock was created on the spot by a supernatural being, and that is exactly what happened, than my statement is an explanation of what happened.
Testable predictions are an addagio that is specific to natural sciences. Asking to every single explanation for any kind of phenomena out there to have testable predictions is a sign of dogmatism and ideological bigotry.
Of course. But what reasons are there for believing they are sometimes right?
>If I tell you that a certain rock was created on the spot by a supernatural being, and that is exactly what happened, than my statement is an explanation of what happened.
If. I've essentially got the same question as above here: what reasons are there for believing that this does actually happen?
>Testable predictions are an addagio that is specific to natural sciences. Asking to every single explanation for any kind of phenomena out there to have testable predictions is a sign of dogmatism and ideological bigotry.
I actually agree that it's not a matter of what we can (at least at the moment) test. It's too strong a requirement. But that doesn't get you off the hook. It doesn't therefore mean that anything that can't be tested can just be asserted as true.
If something is to be believed, there has to be some reasons that suggest that it is the case. These can be good reasons, or they can be poor reasons. They can be quite flawed. (I think they ultimately should be grounded in evidence, but that's another matter).
So if someone wants to say we should believe in something supernatural, they still have to justify their claim, and this justification can still be evaluated.
> just as it's as easy to dismiss supernatural explanations just because they're supernatural (although metaphysically plausible)
Why are you suggesting that being "metaphysically plausible" means they shouldn't be dismissed?
> just how hard the scientific community is trying to find a very particular kind of explanation in order to dismiss others
I'm going to call you out on that and say that it is ridiculous to suggest that the scientific community is working on certain kinds of explanations in order to dismiss others.
Science is a great tool for explaining how the brain works, in the sense of "why did I do that?" or "how are signals from the optical nerve processed?". However, because the experience of consciousness is so subjective, I doubt that science will be able to explain it. After all, science is designed to work on objective reality.
The experience is subjective. But what are the actual details that produce that experience? We just don't know. But if it has an explanation there is no reason to presume that that explanation must have the same sorts of properties as what is being explained.
An analogy: before we understood what is actually going on with fire (a kind of molecular reaction), it could seem as if it was a separate category of stuff - what else was there that was like fire? But it would have been wrong to assume that therefore "fireness" was some fundamental, intrinsic property of fire.
As to subjective conscious experience, we don't know what it is, and I don't think there's any reason to think that the explanation will itself be 'subjective', and that it can't be something objective (even if it's some different kind of objective detail, different from anything else we currently understand).