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How do atoms "know" how to arrange themselves into molecules and molecules in to living be

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fathomlessness

Rising Star
How can organisms just spring out of matter without some driving force to define how they are to create themselves? In other words, how could it have done this without having a blueprint or without knowing what to do? Doesn't it just seem a bit random and improbable that innate matter should somehow just "mysteriously" or "unintelligently" organize itself until it springs forth self-aware primates like us who can question how absurd it is that they should come to exist without an apparent design for doing so?

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Also, what is equally bizarre is how evolution can change species' attributes through genetic variations. For how does DNA "know" how to change itself? I am not speaking mechanically here, we know how cells manipulate the organism through changes in DNA as that is all well studied and documented, but what is the prime cause that initiates that change to take place? If a snake had legs, how would the cells coding know to get rid of the legs and thereby enhance the organism through adaption? How did prehistoric human cells decide to shed their tails?

P.S. I was inspired to write this after reading this thread which questions something so common-place and direct that we tend to overlook it's supremely strange and hitherto unexplored nature.
 

No, it is not improbable at all. In fact, the whole point of evolution is that it is the culmination of the most probable series of event given the environment at any given time (ie. an organism possessing certain traits will be more likely to survive and reproduce than another organism with trait 'xyz'). Also, DNA doesn't "know" anything. It's just a molecule. Changes in DNA can be initiated by all sorts of events, from random mutations to sexual reproduction to epigenetic changes caused by environmental factors.

At the end of the day, none of it necessitates logic or intelligence, external or internal, to exist (in the same way the the angles in a triangle just add up to 180 degrees whether you like it or not, no external god-mind necessary).
 
If you roll a pair of dice 59million times, there is a pretty good chance that you'll get a seven 10 times in a row.
The difference with evolution is that once a successful adaptation emerges, the odds of it continuing are inverse of the far off odds of emerging. It seems that at a basic level the universe is a dice junkie. Even atoms and sub-atomic particles run on statistics.
 
Psybin said:

No, it is not improbable at all. In fact, the whole point of evolution is that it is the culmination of the most probable series of event given the environment at any given time (ie. an organism possessing certain traits will be more likely to survive and reproduce than another organism with trait 'xyz'). Also, DNA doesn't "know" anything. It's just a molecule. Changes in DNA can be initiated by all sorts of events, from random mutations to sexual reproduction to epigenetic changes caused by environmental factors.

At the end of the day, none of it necessitates logic or intelligence, external or internal, to exist (in the same way the the angles in a triangle just add up to 180 degrees whether you like it or not, no external god-mind necessary).

That doesn't answer my question at all. This is just the sort of post I was expecting. Something along the lines of "DNA doesn't know anything", yet completely misses what it is I am trying to get across in favor of quickly offering your "sceptical" opinion against a belief in intelligent design or similar that you assumed was being transmuted. That is what happens when you think too literally when someone talks about objects "knowing" something and when you are quick to educate someone rather than explore the alternative possibilities of interpretation than the one you get by quickly skimming it over trying to find the first flaw to point out. Like I said in my OP "For how does DNA "know" how to change itself? I am not speaking mechanically here, we know how cells manipulate the organism through changes in DNA as that is all well studied and documented", so you didn't need to reiterate that point since I already stated it. What I want to know is what is the prime cause that initiates that change to take place? Now you say it "can be initiated by all sorts of events, from random mutations to sexual reproduction to epigenetic changes caused by environmental factors" but that still is not getting at the root of the problem, you are only describing the conditions needed for change to occur and not what controls those changes and most importantly HOW the cells discern what changes need to occur. How do cells pick up on what is evolutionary advantageous or not? They must do if they can just make a tail fall of ad-lib. This isn't just about cause and effect here, it's not as easy as passing on traits through procreation, or mutations caused by harmful stimuli like viruses. It is about how the cell knows how to respond. How they can program themselves 'intelligently'. Aeroplanes don't just assemble themselves out of a junkyard. In the cell there is something which tells it how to act. Tails just don't drop off because of "sexual reproduction, random mutations, environmental factors", tails drop off because the cell understands what is useful for survival and what isn't and adapts THROUGH "sexual reproduction, mutations". Once again, don't misunderstand me here when I say "the cell understands" as this is not a literal use of the word but is used how you would say something like "the universe is unfriendly" which if taken literally would mean that the universe has a personality and agency of it's own which is not what is implied, merely that the environment seems hostile. So what I want to know is how the cell know this and therefore can change the it's own programming?

Furthermore, you seem to say it isn't improbable at all by trying say that because evolution exists, it is self-validating in that it isn't improbable. This completely denies the information of statistics of improbability of evolution being created being natural processes as outlined in the video attached and once again this misunderstands what is meant in the OP. Just because we exist doesn't mean to say it isn't improbable. I think you meant to say that because we exist it isn't "impossible" that we should exist but you decided to use the word improbable instead. because it doesn't not make sense to say that because we exist it discounts all evidence of the improbability that we should not exist. For example, if we had a 10 to power of 3 billion chances existing then just by the fact that we exist alone, it doesn't deny that it is highly improbable that we are existing. So the fact that we are existing says absolutely nothing on the validity of probability of us existing, but only on the impossibility of us existing.

Lastly, you seem to infer that I was referring to an external "god-mind" in your last post which is a bit invalid and uncalled for. You are right that cells and physical matter don't necessitate logic or intelligence to exist because that would be absurd, logic and intelligence are products of the human minds and can not exist any where else, if they did then we would have to change the definition of those two terms. So I can't even begin to imagine why you would bring that up as it bears no resemblance to what is asked in the OP. I think you wish to deny this inquiry as some sort of appeal to a deity or intelligence of some kind because you can't bare to look at the absurdity in what I am pointing out. Complexity and form don't just spring out of random chaos, nor does a aeroplane spring out of a junkyard. So let's start considering what has caused these atoms to arrange themselves in to proteins and therefor cells and what is causing the cell to know how to program itself intelligently.

P.S. The Argument from incredulity says that when someone can't personally understand how it could happen, it therefore means that it did not happen. Which is not what I am saying, I am merely asking a question and not asserting that it is or is not absolutely the case. The same goes for the argument from incredulity.
 
syberdelic said:
If you roll a pair of dice 59million times, there is a pretty good chance that you'll get a seven 10 times in a row.
The difference with evolution is that once a successful adaptation emerges, the odds of it continuing are inverse of the far off odds of emerging. It seems that at a basic level the universe is a dice junkie. Even atoms and sub-atomic particles run on statistics.

"are inverse of the far off odds of emerging"

do you mean

"are inverse to the far off odds of emerging"?

in other words, the odds of a successful adaption continuing is at the opposite end of the spectrum to the rare things that come to be? (i just changed each word for a synonym)
. If so then yeah, that just means that what survives or adapts to survive is the opposite of that which is very rare meaning that what survives continues to survive and proliferates more and more like an unstoppable disease. I just don't see what that says about the question in the OP though, since I was asking how we came to be just by "supposed pure coincidence" even despite the vast improbability of that being so (1 in 10 to the power of 164). Also, how cells can act with great precision, complexity and seeming intelligence all the while being without "knowledge" of what they are doing. I mean, if you saw a chipmunk punching out the works of shakespeare not knowing what it was doing then I am sure you would be surprised and likewise it is the same for encoding within the cell, only people want to say things like "the chipmunk is mechanism purely dependent on cause and effect, you give it a stimuli and it responds in predictable patterns, it is just a response to environmental stimuli and previous chipmunk genetics" which really doesn't explain how the chipmunk knows how to do it.
 
fathomlessness said:
A very thought-provoking video! The universe is *hardly* random. There is inevitably an ordering to the universe that may seem chaotic and random at first glance, but look long enough and one sees many patterns emerging... that imply, inevitably, an intelligence of sorts. Like the Fibonacci seqeunce, Golden mean, Golden spiral, and how it connects to observable patterns in nature.

fathomlessness said:
How can organisms just spring out of matter without some driving force to define how they are to create themselves? In other words, how could it have done this without having a blueprint or without knowing what to do? Doesn't it just seem a bit random and improbable that innate matter should somehow just "mysteriously" or "unintelligently" organize itself until it springs forth self-aware primates like us who can question how absurd it is that they should come to exist without an apparent design for doing so?
Exactly. To any truly careful, observant, philosophically-minded thinker who examines all of the raw knowledge we have of own experiences and the experiences told by others, it seems inevitable to me that such a thinker must eventually conclude that there is an intelligence that guides the universe, and intelligences that guide the respective individual lifeforms and their evolution and growth from birth to death.

This blueprint I would personally define as the Archetype, the "Group Soul", that the individual's greater Self follows behind the scenes... somehow. While I know that there is such a blueprint, I'm not exactly sure how the individual Soul and the Archetype interact to produce the physical being, including the Aura which constructs and tethers matter together in the very ways it does, which also includes the ego-mind and limited senses which we, the individual, are constricted and blinded by. Hope this makes sense, because I'm not experienced enough to know how else to explain it in a more general manner.

fathomlessness said:
Also, what is equally bizarre is how evolution can change species' attributes through genetic variations. For how does DNA "know" how to change itself? I am not speaking mechanically here, we know how cells manipulate the organism through changes in DNA as that is all well studied and documented, but what is the prime cause that initiates that change to take place? If a snake had legs, how would the cells coding know to get rid of the legs and thereby enhance the organism through adaption? How did prehistoric human cells decide to shed their tails?
The ego-mind, the aura, the deep personal unconscious, the collective human unconscious? Not sure what to think, knowing so little about how Soul, mind and body integrate... but, I do wonder if individual cells have an individual autonomy? I've heard cancer cells be claimed as rouge cells, and from the alternative medicine side, as a protective mechanism by the body to isolate otherwise fatal conditions and illness... who knows...

fathomlessness said:
P.S. I was inspired to write this after reading this thread which questions something so common-place and direct that we tend to overlook it's supremely strange and hitherto unexplored nature.
We all too easily succumb to something of a herd mentality, albeit subconsciously... social conditioning, layers of which are built up over so many years that we barely question what guides our decision making? Perhaps because society and day-to-day life leave little room for most to even focus on these questions, given the insanity of the hectic, consumerist, mindless Western lifestyle dominated by wage slavery, people having to live day-to-day, week-to-week, overrun by subconscious anxiety?

Tribal societies that don't have the burdensome pressures, conscious and subconscious, that distract us from the stuff that deserve more focus...
 
How atoms form molecules is easily explainable...

Let's look at the properties of atoms, we have a proton nucleus, which consists of positively charged protons and neutral neutrons (protons are built from quarks), the number of protons in the nucleus determines the chemical element. surrounding the proton nucleus are elementary particles called electrons which carry a negative electrical charge.

A chemical bond is a lasting attraction between atoms that enables the formation of chemical compounds. The bond may result from the electrostatic force of attraction between atoms with opposite charges, or through the sharing of electrons as in the covalent bonds. -Wikipedia

The outter most shell of electrons is known as the "valence shell"

Then you have valence electrons, these are electrons which can participate in chemical bonds, and which determine the chemical properties of elements.

(The periodic table goes from the far right row having full valence shells, having no gaps in their outrer most atomic shell of electrons (Nobel gasses), then to the next row over to the left Which have one gap in the valence shell, these elements have one gap in their atomic shell of electrons (row 7a halogens), these elements desperately want to fill this gap, making them quite reactive. next row to the left has two gaps, and so on...Then as you go down the rows the elements get heavier, containing more protons in their nucleus. )

Look at the benzene ring, each carbon atom has 4 available valance electrons, 4 gaps in its atomic shell, so two are double bonded to the carbon on one side of it, one is bonded to the carbon on the other side, and the last is filled by a hydrogen atom, giving the geometric formation of the benzene ring...

The number of electrons in the outermost shell of a particular atom determines its reactivity, or tendency to form chemical bonds with other atoms. This outermost shell is known as the valence shell, and the electrons found in it are called valence electrons. In general, atoms are most stable, least reactive, when their outermost electron shell is full. Most of the elements important in biology need eight electrons in their outermost shell in order to be stable, and this rule of thumb is known as the octet rule. Some atoms can be stable with an octet even though their valence shell is the 3n shell, which can hold up to 18 electrons. We will explore the reason for this when we discuss electron orbitals below.

Ok, so every atom has its own set of rules which determines how it reacts with other atoms, and then as atoms randomly interact, each following their own rules, molecular structures are formed. (chemical reactions are also affected by conditions, such as temperature, pressure, etc... )

So just based off of a few simple chemical rules, atoms form molecules, molecules form matter, and so on...

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A chemical bond is a lasting attraction between atoms that enables the formation of chemical compounds. The bond may result from the electrostatic force of attraction between atoms with opposite charges, or through the sharing of electrons as in the covalent bonds. -Wikipedia




-eg
 
I would just like to point out that it is not necessary for some sort of intelligence to be behind evolution. Yes, it is very possible. Many things are possible, but I see so many people trying to justify their existence as being important or profound through some sort of explanation of the universe that ties us to a higher consciousness/intelligence.

I would tell them to just step back from it all for a minute and consider the possibility that yes, we are important simply because we have the intelligence to have a lasting and profound effect on the world around us. You do not need to have some sort of mystic or universal origin in order to have a profound existence.

If people want to believe things that can't be proven, I'm perfectly fine with that but acknowledge that it is an unknown and treat it as such. I have seen too many people become convinced through faulty logic of things that simply cannot be proven. Just read some of Thomas Aquinas to see my point. But this is definitely not limited to Christianity.

What I ask of all rational thinkers is to consider that it is equally possible that after we die, that's it... Game Over. Maybe there is something else before/after life and that MIGHT be something nice but don't count on it. Make use of what you have right here and right now because this might be it. Take care of the resources that we have and will eventually pass on to the next generation because this might be it. No matter what the ultimate truth is, I believe that it is in all of our best interest to hope for the best and plan for the worst.
 
Yes, its entirely silly to claim proof of any of these big ideas.

And it is just as silly to claim the reverse, based on the little information we have learned about evolution and life itself. DNA, that's likely the least understood.

Just who do we think we are to make such a statement? Rather vain isn't it? To say that human intelligence is the last word.

All we can do is make observations, from the perspective of a human being. No more no less. This we cannot escape. Analogously, does science not show us that visual proof is often the weakest? Max Planck worded it well:
Max Planck said:
Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.

The more we learn about it, the less certain we become. Not the reverse. As the circle of facts grows larger, so does the circumference of the unknown.

---
As for belief in the things that cannot be proved? That is just a matter of choice.

One choice is fairly limited, limited to a few laws and principles tightly bound by only what human observation has conjured in the past century. Being that life originated out of nothing, means nothing, and proceeds nowhere.

The other choice is infinitely larger, includes the first, is imaginative, creative, and ever changing. It can include whatever conception you desire. It does not need to be what others tell you.

Einstein said:
“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”

And on that, intellectual belief alone is rather weak. It exists merely for purposes of philosophy.

It is a different thing altogether to experience something, and to know something to be true. Based on this subjective experience alone, and to know others before you had independently come to that same conclusion. This is a powerful and mystical phenomenon, and it is old as human history. And in my opinion, the single driving force behind it all.

I think of what Carl Jung said when asked if he believed in God, he chuckled, and replied lightly "I don't need to believe, I know!"

or as Echkart Tolle puts it: "You may believe it to be true, but you no longer know it to be true. A belief may be comforting. Only through your own experience, however, does it become liberating."

Einstein said:
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead —his eyes are closed. The insight into the mystery of life, coupled though it be with fear, has also given rise to religion. To know what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness.”


----

and to the OP, the arguments made in that video are entirely valid. Very recently (2014,2016) new research has uncovered additional layers of information that DNA (AND RNA!!) stores.

RNA

DNA

"a second layer of information in RNA" , "In parallel to the genetic code for protein synthesis, a second layer of information is embedded in all RNA transcripts in the form of RNA structure."

Abiogensis mostly rests on RNA, the most primitive form of life in terms of self-replicating molecules. The increased complexity of its function makes it even less probable, by a significant degree... The difficulty of putting these two layers of information together.. It is clear we are missing something.

my personal way of viewing it is that life happens as naturally as stars and planets and galaxies do. We just don't yet have the driving force pinpointed to back it up, like we do for the others (and even with the others, we don't really have it).
 
syberdelic said:
I would just like to point out that it is not necessary for some sort of intelligence to be behind evolution. Yes, it is very possible. Many things are possible, but I see so many people trying to justify their existence as being important or profound through some sort of explanation of the universe that ties us to a higher consciousness/intelligence.

I would tell them to just step back from it all for a minute and consider the possibility that yes, we are important simply because we have the intelligence to have a lasting and profound effect on the world around us. You do not need to have some sort of mystic or universal origin in order to have a profound existence.

If people want to believe things that can't be proven, I'm perfectly fine with that but acknowledge that it is an unknown and treat it as such. I have seen too many people become convinced through faulty logic of things that simply cannot be proven. Just read some of Thomas Aquinas to see my point. But this is definitely not limited to Christianity.

What I ask of all rational thinkers is to consider that it is equally possible that after we die, that's it... Game Over. Maybe there is something else before/after life and that MIGHT be something nice but don't count on it. Make use of what you have right here and right now because this might be it. Take care of the resources that we have and will eventually pass on to the next generation because this might be it. No matter what the ultimate truth is, I believe that it is in all of our best interest to hope for the best and plan for the worst.

I find it funny that you state your opinion that "it is not necessary for some sort of intelligence to be behind evolution" and yet don't provide any reasoning or evidence behind it. My OP and following posts clearly outline why it is absurd if the universe and evolution has no intelligence yet you feel it is somehow entirely valid to just come on here and say "guess what? I don't think it does, so there!". That is not how you win arguments or even provide good intellectual conversation. 😉

I agree with you that many people are FAR to quick to just say "god did it" and explain away good hypothesis that are somewhat too abstract to think clearly about. What I was saying in the OP was that from statistics the notion that we are here by natural causes is vastly vastly vastly improbable. You know, when you deal with that sort of improbability... to common sense you might as well say it is impossible. For example someone asked you to sit in a waiting room for 4 weeks in the hope that you might win a million dollars with a probability of 1 in 10 to the power of 164, you would just walk away because you know that is just so far beyond a possibility you wouldn't bother (watch the video provided for a better explanation of scale). So that is one point that makes the absurdity of lack of intelligent cause apparent. So to say that the reason we exist can be explained rationally by that statistic alone without any other factor like an "intelligence" or some other physical cause is just plain unsound. It is equivalently unsound as a farmer pouring acid on his soil knowing there is a 1 in 10 to the power of 164 chance that he will have a good yield, all the while being confident that his explanation for why his crops will grow provides satisfactory reasoning to do so without the need for "divine intervention" or "explanation of intelligent causes" or not even superstition at all syberdelic... JUST SOMETHING else, some other process, even in terms of scientifically observable phenomena that will explain why he is not just being an absolute fool for believing his crops will grow.

The second one is the one I said in the OP, that we don't know why cells choose to act in the way they do. We know their functions, what causes what to occur... but why they spontaneously do things like dissolve tails in ancient humans? If a snake had legs, how would the cells coding know to get rid of the legs and thereby enhance the organism through adaption? Cause and effect processes (like that seen when you damage cells DNA it causes the cell to have an effect which is mutation) don't explain this. It appears the cell is going through some process of self-analysis/self-regulation and "knows" what to do, "knows" how to organize itself. Why? Once again because cause and effect mechanisms don't explain why those changes occur. What I would like is some tech info to explain it like "once tail cells stop activating the enzyme 341 over a period of 10 centuries it causes a chain reaction in the sub region of tail dna, which is a catalyst for changes in control of gene expression via the E134 binding protein.) None such exists. Even if such information did exist, it still wouldn't explain why atoms are combining to form organisms. Do you see that? We can explain it mechanistically through and through, about how atoms work and how cells work and how brains work but that still doesn't explain why atoms just seemed to spring forth living organisms? We can say what caused it (even despite it's improbability) but why? Doesn't that seem a little odd to you? That you have this lifeless universe and somehow, out of nowhere, atoms arrange themselves to form conscious individuals? There is a huge gap in explanation here that is left out even when you explain all the functions mechanistically. Trying to get science to explain the universe in this way is like trying to describe psychology by behaviorism alone, there are parts unaccounted for which is the reason of this thread to bring light to them.
 
So the cell behaviorally seems to exhibit an intelligence. And we know the cell is only interested in survival. The cell is selfish to its core. This is a very interesting question indeed. I was actually just thinking along these lines in recent days. I was wondering how can it be that a cell on one end of the body is in coherent communication with a cell at the other end of the body unless there was some kind of field in which all the cells are "informed" with the life-principle. For example we know how electrical signals are generated at the axon hillock which then travel down the axon and end in interneuron communication. But what about the next neuron it communicates with? The next neuron receives the chemical signal which is retranslated into an electrical signal which terminates in some kind of effect on the neuron's nucleus, before another electrical signal can be created at the axon hillock and then propagated down the axon on its other side. We know that memory consists of spatiotemporal patterns of activations made across networks of neurons, but we do not know how exactly memory is stored because we apparently have no idea where memory is stored. I was asking all these questions in my neuropsychology class and everyone was dumbfounded. People are not stupid; it's just we've never thought about it, and the reason we don't think about it is because we don't notice it and we don't notice it because people are devoid of wonder. If memory is not stored in the nuclear DNA then where the hell is it? How does a cell "understand what is useful for survival and what isn't?" Doubtlessly, the thing is obviously possessed of an intelligence, but I don't think it is an intelligence that can be comprehended logically, and what I mean by that is linearly. It is rather of a fractal order. There never was just one, but a proliferation of resonances of the one all in communication across all levels; they're just not using the same phonetic and alphabetic language as we. I think that whatever intelligence guides one cell is in principle cohering all of them together in a field of resonance. And this intelligence must have something to do with memory, because without memory there can be no learning. And if cells are to their core selfish meaning they desire solely survival, then the only way that can be fulfilled is if there is some kind of memory system in place, some way to record what took place in the past, equally also recording what is not going on in the present so it knows also which features to do away with.

Maybe I'm crazy but in my opinion nature is so incredibly intelligent it is impossible for us to fathom. Just a small dose of its touch would be equal to the vision of a candle lit in total darkness over thirty miles away. That is the circumstance of the human mind. The infinite intelligence is so everywhere so apparent that the mind can't see it because the mind is causal mechanism. It links together events called cause and effect bridging conceptually the space between the events and the amount of time that passed between the two events. A great thing doubtless. But the scope of that kind of mind is the scope of your eye to barely detect that candle lit thirty miles away. Well, whatever intelligence is working to initiate the cells to change is as large as the darkness that takes up 99.999999% of your view as that very tiny point of light reaches one of millions of cells in your retinas. As smart as we think we are we are also to that extent equally dumb. Intelligence comes and goes in the universe as occasionally perhaps as you blink your eyes to refresh your vision.

The harder we look into the mystery the more it recedes into incommensurability. I remember in one of my heavy psilocybin trips I was just convinced somehow with the greatest intensity that our very inspection of the micro and macro scales of the universe is itself catalyzing the expansion of the universe. There is no more novel event than when universe meets universe. It's a kind of singularity where the more you look the more you discover that your very looking is accelerating the business of the universe to expand into ever greater complexities. It is the Self meeting the Self. It is Oroboros. Are the energies in us reaching a superluminal level where faster than light speed communication we will discover is true telepathic communication. I've been telling people for two years now that faster than light is the transmission of thought. There is a non locality to thought that is accessible in imagination which is common to all human minds. Telepathic communication however becomes possible only after the dissolution of individual identities into a group mental workspace - the Imagination. We enter into a thoughtspace where all thoughts that are being thought by all beings are accessible. The thoughts are not 2-d linear type thoughts. These thoughts are 3-d in-your-face type thoughts. Just fish as it were in the sea of the common human imagination.

Similar to this thoughtspace is what may have happened to the cells. Maybe the cells really have no intention at all to survive if they have no individual consciousness that they are alive or dead. Is there a governor intender? Maybe the central locus of the intender is what you call your freedom of will, to do things, to act, to think this or that, to make decisions. After decisions are made whether consciously or subconsciously, this information translates somehow into a field that simultaneously can influence all cells within its "gravity", which reach only as far as the boundary of your body. It may reach even further I suspect. In other words this means that having within one's imagination a picture of what one wants "in life", the more detailed that image, the more this sends a coherent uplifting energizing effect on the cells, and included within this effect would be the change in the DNA to encode for the behavior of the cell.

This stuff really isn't as far out as you might think. Rupert Sheldrake is doing some great work on all this and I think he really is an unrecognized genius. Just a side note: start looking at everyone you meet, everyone you talk to and listen to, start looking at them as though they are geniuses. They are. They simply have not recognized it. Believe this and I promise miracles will happen in your own mind. Nothing blocks the fruits of wonder-full and fun thinking as jealousy and a false commitment to be skeptical all the time and somehow through that be always on the "right side", making you always right! I know I'm off on a tangent and off the rails of the thread but whatever. The other day on youtube I saw a comment demeaning the phenomenon of placebo effect. I had to respond. Then, someone said that I was an idiot for saying that as we believe we see and not the other way around. Which, I totally understand that perspective because I've been there in the past. I've learned this about us: that it is convenient and just easier to criticize a creation than to take the risk of trying to create something and possibly being rejected or being just plain wrong. I have found that I cannot be an critic and an effective creator or co-operator at the same time.

Anyway, Sheldrake is on top of it. Has anyone heard of his morphogenetic fields? Basically any animal that learns a skill for the first time ever in the species will somehow have the effect of other animals somewhere else and somewhen in time being able to learn the same skill faster. That nuts! Basically it means that I can learn calculus much faster now that millions of other human minds have mastered calculus. Same goes for every other subject and new idea that came onto the scene. The structure of these organizing forces of nature is fractal, where in each level spatially and temporally, what happens establishes a resonance that simultaneously appears on all levels. There is an organizing force on all the cells of a body. There is equally probably an organizing force on all human beings, just as there is an organizing force to an enormous flock of black birds in the sky. Ever notice how they all turn together at once? There is no leader. But who makes the decision to turn in whatever direction in that group? Maybe it is the intelligence of the group mind of the birds that simultaneously informs each member which direction to turn. Wouldn't that have to be some kind of a field? Or is it just what happens when you have many brains together that take on the illusion of operating within a field, because they are all alike.

Great stuff. Keep the ideas coming folks. I tell you this: the DMT-Nexus is invaluable. Because discussions like this I cannot have with anyone I know. Literally there is noone around. The stuff just goes right through them. It blows my mind how people can be so not-interested in things, but raise hell if they have to work on the day of the Super Bowl. If you don't exercise your mind no one will and eventually you won't remember that one day in the past you were absolutely brilliant because you'll have Alzheimer's disease and be incapable of appreciating the infinite beauty and complexity of the existence. I look around and everyone is addicted to their phones and talking to them they act like I'm the one that's insufferable for having interrupted their dopamine flow. Ridiculous. I am a human being and my mind is as large as the universe. And I know yours is too. Don't let the fools around who will allow their minds to atrophy draw you into that dark cave of forgetful oblivion where there is no dimension of imagination to be found. You must generate 2 constructive, creative responses to every 1 criticism you wish to make. This balances the power between the rational mind and the imaginative mind in a healthy way.

Anyway, back to the point of the thread...
 
Mindlusion said:
This paper made me think twice about evolution, and life itself.

😉 What made you come across this?

Conclusion:

What would constitute absolutely convincing evidence that adaptive mutations occur? It has
been argued that nothing will do so except the demonstration of a molecular mechanism. This is an entirely unwarranted burden to place upon any field of study.
Traditionally, the reality of a phenomenon is established by observations of it, not necessarily
by understanding its cause. Where would the science of genetics be now if classical genetics
had had to wait for the discovery of DNA?

Regardless of how mutations arise, the real mystery is why they appear to do so only when
they are useful. The simplest explanation is that the role of selection is not to direct a process,
but to stop a process that is creating transient variants at random. However, we still do not
know the nature of the transient variants or the identity of the editing mechanism.
“Sweet are the uses of adversity.” The importance of adaptive mutation is not that natural
selection is being circumvented, but that natural selection is apparently being allowed to choose
among a cell’s population of informational macromolecules (16). Thus, individual cells not
only control their phenotypes by regulating the expression of their genes, but they also seem
to have access to a multitude of potential genotypes, allowing the individual to increase its
variability when it would be useful to do so, while maintaining its genome more or less intact.
Understanding the mechanisms underlying this phenomenon in microorganisms may also shed
some light on the way mutations arise in nondividing somatic cells in mammals, leading to the
success (for the cells) that we call cancer.
 
I will post more on this later, but I'd like to point out that cells have mutations almost constantly. It is only the successful ones that proceed.
 
Now that I'm caught up on the reading; Fathomless and Anamnesia, I am not disagreeing with either of you, or at least not entirely. I think that the ideas being proposed are entirely possible. The point that I'm trying to make is that although it is entirely possible that there is some sort of driving intelligence behind evolution and its mechanisms, it is still entirely possible that it is purely statistical mechanics at play on particles that have been proven to follow statistical models. There is simply not the evidence to say that one way or the other has to be true/false.

Unlike Einstein I believe that, if there is a god or some sort of intelligent design to the universe, they do play dice. Everything from evolution to particle physics seems to be a game of odds. But I also believe that if this is the case, then god is also a cheat when judged by traditional gaming ethics. When god gets a royal flush or a full house (at least in evolution), that hand is retained and gets played over and over whenever it is needed.

I like to toy around with some of these concepts that suggest that there is more to life/reality than what is observable, that suggest we are part of something greater than a finite mammalian life bound by causality, limited intelligence, and dimensional constraints, but at the end of the day, I'll give it no more credit than some of the leaps of faith that can be made to support theories brought forward to make sense of the finite data that is available.

I consider myself both spiritual and agnostic. I want to believe in something greater and I "feel" that there is something greater that permeates all life, matter, and even empty space and time, ... ... BUT... I feel that I would be doing myself a disservice in committing to anything that cannot be proven or requires leaps of faith in regards to logic. We live in a complex and sometimes seemingly irrational world that often tempts us into becoming complacent in maintaining sound logic. All I ask is that WE (as a community of "enlightened" individuals) tread carefully in making conjectures about "The true nature of the universe" without having adequate evidence.
 
syberdelic said:
When god gets a royal flush or a full house (at least in evolution), that hand is retained and gets played over and over whenever it is needed.

genetic memory is very cool

here is a good article Genetic Memory: How We Know Things We Never Learned


---

Here is another great article from NewScientist, compiling a lot of recent evolution papers. Unfortunately I can't link the webpage as its subscriber only. But ill copy and paste the text and link the key papers. Nature’s brain: A radical new view of evolution


Despite its huge reach, the theory of evolution is simple. It rests on three pillars: variation, selection and inheritance. Variation stems from random genetic mutations, which create genetically distinct individuals. Natural selection favours “fitter” individuals, with those better suited than others to a particular environment prospering and producing the most offspring. Inheritance means that these well-adapted individuals pass their characteristics down the generations. All this eventually leads to new adaptations and new species.

At first glance, there is no need for learning in this process. In fact, to invoke it at all risks violating one of evolution’s most important principles. When we learn, we in some way anticipate the future, combining solutions from past experience with knowledge of present conditions to develop a strategy for what we think will come next. But evolution can’t see the future: its exploration is born out of random mutations selected or rejected by current circumstances, so it is blind to the challenges to come.

But then again, learning organisms can’t actually see the future. When we cross a road, we can’t anticipate all traffic movements, but we have a memory bank of solutions that have worked before. We develop a strategy based on those – and if it proves successful, we call on that newly learned experience next time. That’s not too dissimilar to what natural selection does when it reuses successful variants from the past, such as the flowers of bee orchids that are unusually good at attracting bees, or the mouthparts of mosquitoes that work like hypodermic syringes and are particularly effective at sucking blood.

Some now think the similarities between learning and evolution go more than skin-deep – and that our understanding of one could help understand the other. Since the early days of computer science, researchers have been developing algorithms – iterative rules – that allow computers to combine banked knowledge with fresh information to create new outputs, and so mimic processes involved in learning and intelligence. In recent years, such learning algorithms have come to underlie much technology that we take for granted, from Google searches to credit-scoring systems. Could that well-stocked toolkit now prise open the secrets of evolution? “The analogy between evolution and learning has been around for a long time,” says Richard Watson of the University of Southampton, UK. “But the thing that’s new is the idea of using learning theory to radically expand our understanding of how evolution works.”

A pioneer of this approach is Leslie Valiant, a computational theorist at Harvard University. In his 2013 book Probably Approximately Correct, he described how the workings of evolution equate to a relatively simple learning algorithm known as Bayesian updating. Used to model everything from celestial mechanics to human decision-making computationally, this type of learning entails starting with many hypotheses and pinpointing the best ones using new information as it becomes available. Replace the hypotheses you want to test with the organisms in a population, Valiant showed, and natural selection amounts to incorporating new information from the surrounding environment to home in on the best-adapted organisms.

A learning network
That could be just coincidence. But in 2014, Erick Chastain at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and his colleagues found a similar equivalence between evolution in a sexually reproducing population and another learning model called the multiplicative weights update algorithm. This presumes there may be many potential solutions to a problem, and the key to finding the best lies in weighting their promise on the basis of past performance. Applying this algorithm and assuming that natural selection gives more weight to previously successful solutions was enough to reproduce how, over generations, evolution homes in on the gene variants with the highest overall fitness.

Such parallels left Watson wondering how a model that more closely follows the genetic changes underpinning evolution might look. Not so long ago, we naively talked about genes “for” particular traits, and assumed for example that humans, being so complex, would have lots of genes. When in the 1990s two groups were vying to sequence the human genome, they believed they would identify some 100,000 genes. To everyone’s surprise, they discovered we have fewer than 25,000. The reason, we now know, is that genes are team players: their activity is regulated by other genes, creating a network of connections. The whole is thus capable of much more than the sum of its parts.

These connections mean that mutations, whether caused by spontaneous chemical changes or faulty DNA repair processes, don’t just alter single genes. When a mutation changes one gene, the activity of many others in the network can change in concert. The network’s organisation is itself a product of past evolution, because natural selection rewards gene associations that increase fitness. This allows your genotype (the set of genes you inherit from your parents) to solve the problem of creating a well-adapted phenotype (the set of outward characteristics that adds up to you). “In evolution, the problem is to produce a phenotype that is fit in a given environment, and the way to do it is to make connections between genes – to learn what goes together,” says Watson.

Watson’s insight was to realize that this whole process has a lot in common with the workings of one of the cleverest learners we know – the human brain. Our brains consist of neurons connected via synapses. Connections between two neurons are strengthened when they are activated at the same time or by the same stimulus, a phenomenon encapsulated by the phrase “neurons that fire together wire together”. When we learn, we alter the strengths of connections, making networks of associations capable of problem-solving.

This is called Hebbian learning after neuropsychologist Donald Hebb, who first described it in the mid-20th century. Simple models based on these networks can do surprisingly clever things, such as recognising and classifying objects, generalising behaviour from examples, and learning to solve optimisation problems. If evolution works in equivalent ways, Watson realised, that could explain why it is such a good problem-solver, creating all that complexity in such short order.

Spontaneous solutions
Working with Günter Wagner from Yale University and others, Watson built a model network in which genes can either increase or reduce each other’s activity, as they do in nature. Each network configuration controls how the genes within it interact to give rise to a different phenotype, presented in the form of a pixelated image on a screen. The modellers evolved the network by randomly changing the gene connections, one mutation at a time, and selecting those networks that produced an image with a closer resemblance to one deemed to be the optimal phenotype – a picture of Darwin’s face. Thus guided, the evolving system eventually reproduced this image, at which point the team used the same process to teach it to reproduce Hebb’s face.


But here came the surprise. The modellers then removed the selection pressure guiding the system towards mugshots of Darwin or Hebb. Any old mutation that arose was allowed to survive. But the system did not produce a random image, or a Darwin-Hebb mash-up. Instead, it produced one or the other face – and as little as a single gene mutation was enough to trigger a flip between the two. In other words, a model that simply took account of genes’ networked nature showed that when the genotype had learned solutions, it could remember them and reproduce them in different environments – as indeed our brains can.

Evidence for learning in this sense is often seen in the natural world, for instance in the way a crocodile genome can produce a male or female crocodile depending on the temperature at which the egg is incubated. But learning the way our brains do it is not just about remembering and reproducing past solutions. “A real learning system also has to be able to generalise – to produce good solutions even in new situations it hasn’t encountered before,” says Watson. Think crossing a road you’ve never crossed before versus crossing a familiar one.

This generalization ability rests in recognizing similarities between new and old problems, so as to combine the building blocks of past solutions to tackle the problem at hand. And as another model created by Watson and his colleagues showed last year, this kind of learning is also what a gene network does under the pressure of natural selection. The cost associated with making gene connections – proteins must be produced and energy expended – favours networks with fewer connections. Subsets of connections that work well together become bound tightly in blocks that themselves are only loosely associated. Just as our brains do, natural selection memorises partial solutions – and these building blocks are embedded in the structure of the gene network (arxiv.org/abs/1508.06854).

This way of working allows genotypes to generate phenotypes that are both complex and flexible. “If past selection has shaped the building blocks well, it can make solving new problems look easy,” says Watson. Instead of merely making limbs longer or shorter, for example, evolution can change whether forelimbs and hindlimbs evolve independently or together. A single mutation that changes connections in the network can lengthen all four legs of a giraffe, or allow a bat to increase its wingspan without getting too leggy. And a feather or an eye needn’t be generated from scratch, but can evolve by mixing and matching building blocks that have served well in the past (see diagram [attached in post]).

This ability to learn needs no supernatural intervention – it is an inevitable product of random variation and selection acting on gene networks. “Far from being blind or dumb, evolution is very smart,” says Watson.


Watson’s idea has caught the attention of respected evolutionary theorists, among them Eörs Szathmáry of the Parmenides Foundation in Munich, Germany. “It is absolutely new,” he says. “I thought that the idea was so fascinating and so interesting that I should put some support behind it.” Earlier this year, he and Watson collaborated on a paper called “How Can Evolution Learn?” to discuss some of its implications (Trends in Ecology and Evolution, vol 31, p 146).

“Evolution looking like the product of intelligence is exactly what you’d expect“
For a start, if evolution learns, by definition it must get better at what it does. It will not only evolve new adaptations, but improve its ability to do so. This notion, known as the evolution of evolvability, has been around for some time, but is contentious because it seems to require forethought. No longer. “If you can do learning, then you are able to generalise from past experience and generate potentially useful and novel combinations,” says Szathmáry. “Then you can get evolvability.”



Applying similar ideas might also begin to explain how ecosystems evolve (see “Eco-learning“). More speculatively, Watson and Szathmáry suggest that the marriage between learning theory and evolutionary theory could throw light on the giant leaps made by evolution in the past 3.8 billion years. These “major transitions”, an idea first formulated by Szathmáry and John Maynard Smith in the 1990s, include the jumps from replicating molecules to cellular organisms, from single-celled to multicellular organisms and from asexual to sexual reproduction. Szathmáry and Watson think the key might lie in a model known as deep learning.

This was how Google DeepMind beat the world’s top player at the ancient and fiendish game of Go earlier this month. It is based on Hebbian learning, with the difference that it “freezes” successive levels of a network once it has learned as much as it can, using the information acquired as the starting point for the next level. “It’s intriguing that evolutionary algorithms exploiting deep learning can solve problems that single-level evolution cannot,” says Watson – although he admits the details of the parallel are still to be worked out. If we could tease out the circumstances required to produce a major transition, that might suggest where evolution is heading next – or even how to engineer a transition. For example, says Watson, it might show us how to transform a community of microbes into a true multicellular organism.

Other evolution researchers are also intrigued. “Watson and Szathmáry are right in recognising that a species’ evolutionary history structures its genes in much the same way that an individual’s learning history structures its mind,” says Mark Pagel of the University of Reading, UK. David Sloan Wilson at Binghamton University, New York, thinks it could be an important step forward too. “In the past, it has been heretical to think about evolution as a forward-looking process, but the analogy with learning – itself a product of evolution – is quite plausible,” he says.

Szathmáry thinks we can fruitfully see that analogy from both ends. If evolution and cognitive learning are based on the same principles, we can use our understanding of either to throw new light on the other. With that in mind, he is now co-opting evolutionary theory to investigate the long-standing puzzle of how infants learn language so easily with no formal teaching and little other input.

Those infants may now grow up with a better grasp on the processes underlying that greatest of theories, evolution by natural selection. If evolution looks smart, that’s because it is, says Watson. “The observation that evolutionary adaptations look like the product of intelligence isn’t evidence against Darwinian evolution – it’s exactly what you should expect.”


Eco-learning

How does a forest develop the ability to share limited resources such as light and water? It’s a puzzle how such seemingly harmonious environments develop from a collection of individuals of different species. “There’s currently no general theory of how ecosystems evolve,” says Richard Watson at the University of Southampton, UK.

By thinking about the genes within organisms as networks, Watson has shown that evolution can learn from the past to solve new problems of survival (see main story). But the same might apply to ecological networks, he thinks.

There is a big difference: ecosystems must “learn” unaided by natural selection because it only favours fit individuals, not fit communities. Computer scientists have a way to model such “unsupervised” learning. Instead of guiding an evolving network towards a solution to a given problem, they use a rule that reinforces already common correlations. Such algorithms are known to efficiently discover categories, clusters and regularities in data sets. Working with his Southampton colleague Daniel Power and others, Watson has used them to model learning in the evolution of an ecological network (Biology Direct, vol 10, p 69).

Remarkably, ecosystem networks allowed to evolve in this way retain collective memories – information about ecological interactions that have produced successful structures and behaviours in the past. This could explain why a damaged coral reef can revert to its former composition if left to recover, or why a rainforest can recover from fragmentation.

It also suggests that if an ecosystem faces a challenge it has encountered in the past, it may be more able to recover than in the face of a new challenge. In theory, an ecosystem’s collective memory could be extremely long, because of being etched into the genomes of the organisms that comprise it. An ecosystem that has experienced warming in the past, for example, might be better equipped to cope with global warming now.


As above, so below.
 

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What if the nothingness drags atoms into the shape they need to be to prevent reality from collapsing into itself?

Our conception of the big bang includes an infinitely small, infinitely hot, infinitely dense "point" which suddenly expanded outwards at a ridiculously fast pace.

I tend to take a Kabbalistic viewpoint towards the whole origin of existence.

You have 3 primordial essences that exist eternally outside of time and space

Ain - Nothing (the void)
Ain Soph - Infinity, no-thing, limitlessness
Ain Soph Aur - the limitless light

Basically, Ain represents the cosmic mother, egg, incubator. It is the fertile void, ready to be filled in by Ain Soph Aur, the limitless light, eternal love. The non-physical relationship between the two is Ain Soph, limitlessness.

Let's remember here that all matter that we know of is actually 99.9999% empty space.

Where does electricity go? Everywhere it is not, through the path of least resistance. Where is there the most nothing?

Our entire existence is based on electricity, and electricity is shaped by the void.
 
anon_003 said:
What if the nothingness drags atoms into the shape they need to be to prevent reality from collapsing into itself?

It's not the atoms shape, it's their reactivity.

An element is determined by the number of protons and neutrons in an atoms nucleus, which is positively charged. Orbiting this nucleus are negatively charged elentary particles called "electrons. The outer most shell of electrons is known as the "valence shell", valence electrons in the valence shell determine reactivity...

A chemical bond is a lasting attraction between atoms that enables the formation of chemical compounds. The bond may result from the electrostatic force of attraction between atoms with opposite charges, or through the sharing of electrons as in the covalent bonds. -Wikipedia

It starts with a "big bang"

A black hole takes matter and condenses it into a singularity, now, say this black hole and the singularity at its center reached a state where it was no longer stable causing it to rupture, causing it contents to explode into a new spatial dimension...it would be a "big bang" would it not?

Now, after the big bang everything was quite hot, so we start out with hydrogen-1, the lightest isotope of hydrogen having a single proton nucleus. Next as things cool deuterium (heavy hydrogen) and helium as well as the isotope helium-4 are formed, speeding things up, we get lithium and beryllium, everything heavier is then generated through "stellar nucleosynthesis", through the super-nova of stars...

I think I explained atoms in post number 7 of this thread...

I explained atomic structure, valence shells, and valence electrons in post 7, which determines how these atoms react with other atoms, which reflects how molecules form, then the molecule's specific properties lead to formation of matter...

As far as how life fits into this, who knows, DNA is an amazing molecule...

-eg
 
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