After just the few three sentences, already...a problem.
To state that lifeless beings have no purpose must be a self-evident metaphysical axiom...since there's no evidence offered to support it. So there's one problem - it's not self-evident.
If the lifeless are purposeless, then why do they exist? If life forms have a goal, what is it?
Granted that life has a purpose - is it Darwinian materialism.... survival and reproduction? If so, then every life is a failure at surviving and sometimes at reproducing! As all life forms die, can we say that the purpose of life is death? If the purpose of life is survival then it fails...every time...unless there's an immaterial life beyond the material!
Physical laws determine evolution of a physical system in a purposeless inevitable way.
Then - how can life forms exist without the support of inanimate beings, George? Doesn't the use of the inanimate by life forms give them a purpose? If life forms require energy and motion to survive, and energy and motion are the subject matter of physics, doesn't life depend on the subject matter of physics?
Purpose and function seem used here univocally....implying the world of physics has no function in biology?
But realism separates function vs. purpose as distinct: efficient cause vs. final cause! That purpose can only be perceived by the (immaterial) intellect leads once again to an immaterial source.
Without human perception purpose would be present but unrecognized.
When inert food is consumed by life forms, does the food then have a purpose when metabolized?
Does a life form lose its purpose when it dies?
Without inert material, life could not exist. So it does have a purpose ...to support life.
This is all part of the general view that unfolds later on as the philosophy of materialism, naturalism and scientism tries to explain what only the (immaterial ) mind can apprehend - purpose.
Materialism can be dismissed by simply asking what vital material substance leaves a living body upon death? It must be material, since only matter exists. Does DNA leave? The ion channels?
Since there is a clear difference between life and death, a material cause cannot explain the difference...but an immaterial cause is possible.
Scientists who accept mathematics are tacitly rejecting materialism, since math is an immaterial abstraction of quantity from the physical world. Math exists in an immaterial way, in an immaterial order of reality. Materialistic claims are self-contradicting so the foundations.
All essays should start with common ground agreements, on using the scientific method and a historically proven philosophical view like realism to correctly design and interpret experiments. Realism - the heritage of Western culture - predates and surpasses the modern philosophies of choice; it uses self-evident axioms over 24 centuries old: an objective world exists, independent of observation; axioms of non-contradiction, finite and sufficient causality, etc.
Science alone lacks the scope of knowledge domains like philosophy and theology to address the full range of human issues .
The path to understanding the purpose of all reality as higher level immaterial causes has been described by such as Blaise Pascal who considered two "orders" of reality, matter and mind. "there is, first of all, the order of quantities - and that is enormous and infinite, the inexhaustible object of natural science. Besides that, the order of the mind, the second great realm of reality, appears, on the basis of quantity, as simply nothing, since quantitatively it takes up no space whatever. And nonetheless, a single mind is greater than the entire order of the quantitative cosmos; because mind, which has neither weight nor length nor breadth, is able to measure the entire cosmos."
To Wolfgang Smith objects of measurement are 'physical objects' of quantity; the math order only captures a physically measurable dimension of reality. He then terms substances of quality having an immaterial order (of the mind) 'corporeal objects'.
To this Joseph (Cardinal) Ratzinger added, "Yet above that stands the order of abstraction of qualities like truth , justice and love. Love signifies the presence of personhood, personality, the ego. That order too is, at first blush, simply 'nothing' in the order of 'mind,' of scientific intelligence, since it cannot be the object of scientific demonstration, And nonetheless, a single motion of love is infinitely greater than the entire order of 'mind,' because only love represents what is truly creative, life-giving and saving power."
This is the level of the person, where mind introspects to become self-conscious, the level of choice, of volition, and of goal processing: setting, planning , execution and attainment of...a purpose or end ......the level of a living soul.
In a video presentation George has stated that:
Bottom -up causation can give emergence to the level of sand-piles of fusion reactions; there's a ceiling to the complexity possible before top-down causation. We still don't understand how the transition to Darwinian evolution occurred ...once it started we still don't know how we jumped over until top-down causation became effective in generating information.
The Mystery of the Origin of Life's Genetic Information
The transition to evolution - biogenesis - is only rationally comprehended via an immaterial source...which is outside the scope of science. Even then George admits ignorance of the link to top-down causation.
But top-down causation from a final physical cause has not been covered in the essay. Describing a host of material, efficient and formal causes will not make the connection to a final goal-oriented cause a reality - unless that cause is immaterial.
Tying up loose ends:
... outside religious belief, rocks and stars have no purpose.
One star, the Sun , has a clear purpose - to support all biota. In general, recognizing the true source of immaterial goals is impossible with a materialistic philosophy, but conceivable in realism...and without divine intervention.
Selection for function has produced the living cell, with a unique set of properties that distinguish it from inanimate systems of interacting molecules.
Purely a description of the living cell differing from the physical components in a dead cell..... but no logical solution offered as to why the difference.
Cells exist far from thermal equilibrium by harvesting energy from their environment.
Then physics is needed...and so serves a purpose! Can life forms disobey the basic laws of energy transfer and motion?
[Cells] are composed of thousands of different types of molecule. They contain information for their survival and reproduction, in the form of their DNA".
How does purpose or function emerge from physics? .... At the micro level, through epigenetic effects in cell development [5] via gene regulatory networks [5] and through adaptive effects in signal transduction networks [9] and synapses [10]. And these are all based at the lower levels in specific molecules: proteins [14] and nucleic acids [19
These are all physical changes. If true, the effect (life) would have greater state of being than the cause(non-life), violating the axiom of realism on sufficient causality. To wit: An effect cannot have an ability/function greater than potentially exists in the cause. In the vulgar form: Something can't give what it ain't got.
The classic question - can one get blood from a stone?
.... this paper will focus on voltage gated ion channels.
If VGIC give purpose or function to life, then the VGIC must be common to all life and all VGIC be dysfunctional at death, when life ends. No evidence is presented in the body or references to support this statement.
... Quantum mechanical interactions based on these forces underlies the existence of the structures of neurons and their component parts.
QM is then just another layer between the physical world and the cause of directed activity - the vital purpose.
In the end, daily life is governed by Newton's laws of motion and Galileo's equations for a falling body, together with Maxwell's equations: and nothing can change those interactions.
The laws have to be changed to agree with experiments. The laws of mechanics and EM have to be modified to include aethereal interactions, which make Maxwell's laws Galilean covariant ...in the form of the Hertz EM laws.
Life collects and analyses information in order to use it to plan and execute future purposeful actions in the light of memory.
Information content is immaterial; the form of coding is physical. More evidence of the immaterial necessity for an immaterial final cause for life.
The key point is that the functions T(X), F1(Y) and F2(Z) are not determined by the underlying physical laws;
These functions could just be undiscovered physical laws. Or is the contention that all the laws of physics are now known...TOE or GUT? That's a whole new achievement to challenge...
.......they can be shaped by evolutionary or in highly complex ways..
Evolution by random selection or complex ways is not a logically complete explanation for the means by which material objects can achieve immaterial operations...without sufficient causality in their nature.
Unlike the case of physical laws, where the relevant interactions cannot be changed or chosen because they are given by Nature and are invariable, these interactions can fulfil widely varying biological or social or mental purposes.
Assumes that all laws of physics are known...and that those known are all correct and complete.
Demonstrably false.
... a digital computer can carry out arbitrary computations,
Arbitrary means random - without reason or logic. The computer carries out the input instructions according to its programmed logic.
Is this somehow an oblique reference to a Turing machine?
Epigenetics: gene expression at lower levels is controlled at lower levels by gene regulatory networks to meet higher level needs
The subject of epigenetics was once called introns or junk DNA...as there was no purpose seen in their presence. (Another proof that purpose is recognized only in the immaterial intellect, not in the material world. In the case of humans this recognition is obviously fallible.)
The point is: does George believe that the book is now closed on genetic control mechanisms?
If so, how is the role of histones and methyl groups discarded?
Physical realisation The hierarchy of structure that underlies existence of life
Can a structure plan itself? Did we humans plan our own genetic structure?
The link of physics to logic: the molecular basis The logic of what happens is enabled by voltage gated ion channels in axon and dendrite membranes ......The implication is that, at least in the brain, ..... Biomolecules perform logical operations.
VGIC and biomolecules are effects, not causes of logical operations... sufficient causality again... what is the real and credible source of the logic?
Energy is of course used in carrying out these logical processes,
So physics does have a function to perform.... enabling vital processes. Should the opening sentences be revised?
..... the necessary energy usage for cellular function is controlled by complex metabolic regulatory networks that determine what energy transactions will take place on the basis of logical operations;
This is nominalism ..... a name of itself doesn't provide the causal power to organize and convert non-living objects into life forms. Did Aristotle's taxonomic hierarchy explain why the life forms were alive?
The possible existence of biomolecules, and particularly the proteins that govern biological activity, results from quantum interactions mediated by the electromagnetic force.
The same is true of inorganic molecules, George. And how do the possibilities become instantiated as actual biomolecules by physical agents?
.....how have the specific proteins that exist and control biological function come into being? .....The relevant proteins exist because of the reading of the genetic information written into our DNA through developmental processes
Where's the adequate causation of the genetic info written in our DNA? As usual, the premise of existing life is necessary- with no material theory to support the first occurrence of life.
These extraordinary complex molecules with specific biological functions (for example, hemoglobin exists in order to transport oxygen in our blood stream) cannot possibly have arisen by chance.
And so the very roots of Darwinism are discarded! Amen to irreducible complexity.
Bottom-up self-assembly will not do the job. They have to have been selected for through the process of Darwinian adaptive selection [2] which creates new information (embodied in the sequences of base pairs in DNA [19]) that was not there before.
But this process is teleological as described, not Darwin's theory of RANDOM SELECTION. The end(final cause) must be known to "adapt" to the desired effect. Adapting to a final end by knowledge of that end is in fact strictly forbidden by random natural selection.
Then reading out that information by cellular processes creates the string of amino acids that forms proteins such as hemoglobin. It then has to fold to give its biologically active form. In principle that step is an energy minimisation operation;
Energy minimization is a mathematical and hence an immaterial process governed by the Lagrange variational principle.
.... a random input ensemble of entities is filtered to produce an ordered output ensemble, adapted to the environment via specific selection criteria.
In this one sentence the contradictions are apparent... random entities produce an adaptation based on criteria from unspecified logical sources ... How can random chaos produce an ordered and desired change based on logic not possessed in the physical world?
Again and again....a physical and material cause is functionally impotent to order reality to conform to a final cause.
.....It is the remorseless continual repetition of the process of randonisation and subsequent selection that gives evolution its extraordinary creative power, underlying the emergence of complex life forms
Does continual addition of 1 ever reach the end of the number system? Neither can any finite number of physical processes explain the life process.
The repetition can only occur over the 5000 years of scientific history, the testability limit of the scientific method...
Insufficient causality, in a nutshell.
In the human case, that reshaping is achieved by technological means derived from the creative activity of the human mind.
Yes...finally...the source of the vital logic supporting life is seen as analogous to the human mind's capability to form new immaterial forms that FOLLOW THE MIND'S FINAL PURPOSE.. But where is Nature's immaterial mind, George?
Development of vision is a multi-level process, with higher level needs driving lower level selection of structure and function: 7 • The top level need is for a visual system that will enhance survival; • The next level need is for eyes, an optic tract, thalamus (a relay station for signals on the way to the cortex), and neocortex to analyse incoming data; • The next level is a need for photo receptor cells within the retina, and neurons and synapses to constitute neural networks to analyse the data; • One then needs specific kinds of proteins to make this all work , for example rhodopsins in Light Harvesting Complexes and voltage gated ion channel proteins in the cortex;
Two problems - at least:
this vision solution via evolution must occur all at once; intermediate steps would be discarded by natural DESELECTION as ineffectual.
Development of vision implies a goal defined by a material nature incapable of future planning.
Thus natural selection is a top down process adapting animals to their environment in suitable ways, thereby altering the details base-pair sequence in DNA.
Why haven't the gene labs copied this ersatz top-down process and altered the DNA base pairs to produce designer life forms, as nature does?
When the human genome was first decoded promises were made of great advances in knowledge of the genomic code. But a transparent blueprint it was not. No more than converting an unknown human language into another unknown human language would increase comprehension of the content. Most advances in the 16 years since the translation have been in treatment of diseases ...by trial and error(the old way), not by using 'top-down adaptation'
"Evolution is essentially a process in which natural selection acts as a mechanism for transferring information from the environment to the collective genome of the species".
Information is immaterial in content, so evolution must be , too!
[natural selection] is doubly a top down process, through the environment creating niches (opportunities for life) on the one hand, and through the selection criteria on the other.
Darwinism's natural selection is random unguided undirected physical mutation of the genome and random selection by survival of the fittest. This is bottom-up , not top-down.
...noise provides the basis for selection of outcomes on the basis of higher level selection criteria, thus creating order out of disorder....
And violating the 2nd law of thermodynamics . The scientific universe is closed in space and time.
Statistical randomness between levels provides the material on which selection processes can operate.
Selection processes chosen by what? Or Whom? Selection/adaptation is a conscious choice; random is not...But inanimate objects are unconscious.
...there are many other biomolecules that are used in interaction networks to carry out logical operations.
What is the physical source of the logical operations?
In particular transcription factors binding to specific DNA sequences enable logical operations
The mechanism(efficient cause) is not the reason/purpose . Another link in an incomplete chain of causality.
Adaptation and plasticity Life depends on adaptation to its environment.
By immaterial processes infused into their nature...
The brain plasticity at macrolevels that underlies our adaptive behaviour is enabled at micro levels by biomolecules acting as logical devices choosing alternative outcomes......
The mind chooses alternate outcomes, not the physical brain...
Adaptive selection could not take place without physics, but unlike physics is a purposeful process in that it has the logic of increasing fitness.
It's difficult to see how adaptive selection due to increasing fitness benefits the random survivors of extinction catastrophes...which account for more than 90% of all extinctions.
It is irreversible, because species die out in order that others succeed;
The dodo, passenger pigeon and wooly mammoth have recently become extinct. What extant species are documented as owing their survival to their failure to survive?
We know the environment today and the species dependencies on the environment.... So which ones will die out; which will succeed?
In mass extinctions survivors seem to succeed by blind luck, not because others were extinguished.....don't you think?
the development of the language capacity ....distinguishes us from the great ape.
Testing by scientific methodology goes back at most 5 millennia; this history shows development of different languages, but not language per se. The formation of humans with intrinsic language capability, both physical and mental, is another scientific option.
The key thing that enabled this all to happen was the origin of life, when adaptive evolutionary processes came into being. We still do not know how that happened.
Nor does mainstream science know what drives life to exist amid non-life....the life principle
AMDG,
Robert Bennett
