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Q6T46nT668w6i3m

It’s strange they are all engineering problems.

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What would be your idea of a biology problem that isn't an "engineering" one?

It seems that understanding biology could be characterized as trying to figure out "how did nature engineer this".

For that matter isn't all of science this way?

Chemiosmotic effect

What aspect of that is an unsolved problem, and one that feels more fundamental rather than engineering / in need of explanation ?

Its not unsolved. It's very solved. It was not an engineering question.

It seems that physics -> chemistry -> biology is a layering of abstractions and/or emergent phenomena, and any explanations of mechanics at these higher levels is more along the lines of "how was this built from these lego blocks" rather than being some more fundamental discovery.

You keep on making assertions - perhaps you could back it up with some explanation of why you regard this as a more fundamental discovery (or however you would like to characterize it)?

"how was this built from these lego blocks"

That is not engineering. Nobody would call astronomy or cosmology engineering and it is very much the study of "how the universe is built from some basic building blocks.

Don't assign a reductive meaning to engineering that is so encompassing that everything everywhere is engineering, else you render "engineering" a meaningless concept

There are certainly non engineering problems out there... For one example, in biomedicine it's known cancer in different organs can have preference of having immune hot (in skin and lung cancer, e.g.) and cold tumors (in pancreatic and prostate cancer, e.g.), and current immunotherapy work much less well on the latter. Why this pattern exists is still an open question very important for treating patients and it's not a how did nature engineer question as it's a unintended byproduct from several tiers of complex biology involving understanding mutational burden in tumor cells, immune surveillance surrounding the tumors, and mechanical structure of the tissue, etc. The engineering payoff comes later, i.e., immunotherapy works better on a particular subset of patients, after explaining and understanding the biological phenomenon first.

In a sense all experimental science has an element of engineering. For instance the first problem, "the origins of life" is framed to require an experiment to show that any proposed mechanism actually works.

Right? Where's the substrates of consciousness, or the actual solutions for protein/rna folding, or the requirements for evolution?

Substrates of consciousness? You mean the neural correlates of consciousness which we already have?

As a neuroscientist: no. Not what I mean.

Then please enlighten me. What else do you want except what neural activity is necessary and sufficient for a conscious experience?

Substrates of consciousness… I think they don’t have it here because they can’t come up with an answer a bunch of AI models will find. Certainly a Millenium problem for biology if there ever was one.

What else?

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