The hard problem, that is, of “qualia”: The things we all know about and can discuss, whose limits are generally understood, but no one can define? So “life” is like “liberty” or “justice”?
Last night, I noted that we cannot even define life, but still … many are sure it must be a fully natural event. Why are they sure, under the circumstances?
Rob Sheldon comments helpfully:
We are trying to do far too many things at once with these definitions. Life doesn’t have to evolve to be life, for the simple reason that “liveness” is determined on a timescale of seconds to minutes (or possibly hours), whereas evolution is defined on a timescale of millennia to aeons.
I think intuitively we can tell the difference between a live dog and and a dead one pretty easily, or the difference between a live spider and a rubber one. In fact, we need to make this distinction pretty rapidly just to survive and swat mosquitos, for example.
So no, this is difficulty with defining life isn’t really a semantic or comprehension difficulty, its a philosophical difficulty. It gets in the way of promoting Darwinism, OOL, and abortion, for example. And that’s what all the contortions are about–attempts to find definitions that promote all one’s favorite philosphies and detract from one’s enemies. The best definition of all is “Life is what I say it is and not what everyone else falsely claims.”
Now that we’ve settled this definition, can we get on with the question of how OOL occurred and perhaps when?
Well, that is what I propose to do in the current “Science Fictions” series. Establishing that there isn’t a definition of life – as there was, say, for the Higgs boson – is at least some help in evaluating what we are about to see and hear. It may be that, if “life” is a quale (plural is qualia), a technical definition will never exist.
See also: Is there a good reason to believe that life’s origin must be a fully natural event?
and
The Science Fictions series at your fingertips
Although Dr. Sheldon is certainly correct in observing:
although that is certainly correct, I would hold that the simple fact that material things are animate (i.e. moving), although surely an indication that a material object possesses life within itself, still does not capture the full essence of what life truly is. For one thing, the ‘First Mover’ is necessary for motion happening in this universe in the first place:
The reliance for movement in this universe to be on a non-local, ‘first mover’, cause is now empirically demonstrated. i.e. The findings of Quantum Mechanics have now been extended to falsify local realism (reductive materialism) without even using quantum entanglement to do it:
Professor Zeilinger, captures the primary essence of the ‘First Mover’ argument in this following quote/observation:
Thus, since a non-local, beyond space and time, cause is required to explain motion in this universe in the first place, how much more is animate life in this universe required to appeal to a such ‘non-local’ cause?
Moreover, besides the first mover argument, life itself is clearly not reducible to what material things are, or to what they do.
The fact that life is not reducible to what material things are, or to what they do, is most dramatically illustrated with consciousness. Using the Law Of Identity, the fact that the mind/soul cannot be the same thing as the brain/body is clearly established. Dr. Plantinga gives a short, simple, overview of the argument from the Law Of Identity for the mind/soul here:
The Law Of Identity, and the fact that the mind/soul cannot be the same thing as the brain/body, is fleshed out in more detail here:
Moreover, in regards to qualia, (i.e. subjective, conscious experience), it should be noted that qualia is not quite as far removed from ‘scientific testing’ as has been supposed by some people,,,
That qualia, i.e. conscious experience, is not quite as far removed from empirical study as some people might believe, was first strongly hinted at in the infamous double slit experiment,,
Of course, materialists made up all sorts of ‘just so stories’ (many worlds, spontaneous collapse, decoherence, etc..) to try to get around what the double slit experiment was clearly giving us a firm clue of, namely, that a person’s subjective conscious experience is somehow integral to the double slit experiment. But, despite these superfluous objections from materialists, Eugene Wigner came along, with ‘Quantum Symmetries’, and firmly established that the subjective conscious experience of a person is integral to quantum mechanics. Here is Wigner commenting on the key experiment that led Wigner to his Nobel Prize winning work on quantum symmetries,,,
i.e. In the experiment the ‘world’ (i.e. the universe) does not have a ‘privileged center’. Yet strangely, the conscious observer in the experiment does exhibit a ‘privileged center’. This is since the ‘matrix’, which determines which vector will be used to describe the particle in the experiment, is ‘observer-centric’ in its origination! Here are some more quotes by Wigner reflecting this finding:
Moreover, Wigner’s work in Quantum symmetries is not the only place where a person’s qualia, i.e. conscious experience, is found to be integral to quantum mechanics. In the following video, at the 9:11 minute mark of the video,,,
This following experiment is gone over,,
i.e. The preceding experiment clearly shows, and removes any doubt whatsoever, that the ‘material’ detector recording information in the double slit is secondary to the experiment and that a conscious observer being able to consciously know the ‘which path’ information of a photon with local certainty, is of primary importance in the experiment. Then of course there is Leggett’s Inequality which now also has come along and solidly established conscious observation’s centrality to Quantum Mechanics:
If you have trouble accepting the implications of the preceding video, don’t feel alone, Nobel prize winner Anthony Leggett, who developed Leggett’s inequality to try to prove that an objective material reality exists when we are not looking at it, still does not believe the results of the experiment that he himself was integral in devising, even though the inequality was violated by a stunning 80 orders of magnitude. He seems to have done this simply because the results contradicted the ‘realism’ he believes in (realism is the notion that an objective material reality exists apart from our conscious observation of it).
And to further solidify the case that ‘consciousness precedes reality’ the violation of Leggett’s inequalities were extended:
That quantum mechanics applies to the large, ‘macro’, scale of the universe was established here:
In the following article, Physics Professor Richard Conn Henry is quite blunt as to what quantum mechanics, specifically Leggett’s Inequality, reveals to us about the ‘primary cause’ of our 3D reality:
Moreover, as if that were not enough to at least give a hint to materialists that they may be on the wrong track in regards to explaining life in material terms, the ‘Quantum Zeno effect’ also gives us strong evidence that consciousness precedes material reality:
The reason why I am fascinated with this Quantum Zeno effect is, for one thing, that Entropy is, by a wide margin, the most finely tuned of initial conditions of the Big Bang:
i.e. Why in blue blazes should conscious observation put a freeze on entropic decay, unless consciousness was/is more foundational to reality than entropy is? And seeing that entropy is VERY foundational to explaining ‘material’ events within the space-time of this universe,,,
,,,then, since conscious observation puts a freeze on entropic decay of a unstable particle, I think the implications are fairly obvious that consciousness must, of logical necessity, precede the 1 in 10^10^123 entropy of the universe!
In fact, due to advances in quantum mechanics, the argument for God from consciousness can now be framed like this:
Verse, Quote, and Music:
A working definition of life?
How about this: A living being is a “soul”
And what is a “soul”? A soul is an entity with consciousness and intelligence.
The late Dr Lynn Margulis, the Symbiosis Guru, said that ALL living things have consciousness and intelligence. She based this claim on her observations of single celled organisms though a microscope.
What I’m suggesting is using Dr Margulis idea to provide the definition of Life.
bornagain77, I’m not sure if you say my earlier comment here, where I explained why I don’t find the arguments from QM to consciousness having a fundamental role in the universe. While you’ve given somewhat different arguments here, I see many of the same problems. For example, the quantum zeno effect actually shows exactly the same effect with unconscious observation, so the claim that it shows the importance of consciousness is rather hard to take seriously.
Also, you dismiss many worlds, spontaneous collapse, decoherence, etc as “just so stories”, but do you have any objective basis for dismissing them? Do you claim any of these are inconsistent with the various QM tests (Bell & Legett violations, delayed-choice tests, etc)? If not, what’s wrong with them?
Your preferred many worlds scenario is epistemologically self-defeating. In some other quasi infinite self, somewhere out there in your many worlds imagination, you believe that Consciousness and Free Will are integral to Quantum Mechanics. Yet in this present ‘real world’ you claim that logic, not your atheistic/materialistic philosophy, compels you to accept the many worlds scenario as true. Yet logic itself, in order for it to remain binding and true, demands a perspective outside the material/physical order that is not subject to the whims of the material/physical order:
Sam Harris’s Free Will: The Medial Pre-Frontal Cortex Did It – Martin Cothran – November 9, 2012
Excerpt: There is something ironic about the position of thinkers like Harris on issues like this: they claim that their position is the result of the irresistible necessity of logic (in fact, they pride themselves on their logic). Their belief is the consequent, in a ground/consequent relation between their evidence and their conclusion. But their very stated position is that any mental state — including their position on this issue — is the effect of a physical, not logical cause.
By their own logic, it isn’t logic that demands their assent to the claim that free will is an illusion, but the prior chemical state of their brains. The only condition under which we could possibly find their argument convincing is if they are not true. The claim that free will is an illusion requires the possibility that minds have the freedom to assent to a logical argument, a freedom denied by the claim itself. It is an assent that must, in order to remain logical and not physiological, presume a perspective outside the physical order.
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2.....66221.html
Physicalism and Reason – May 2013
Summary: So we find ourselves affirming two contradictory propositions:
1. Everything is governed by cause-and-effect.
2. Our brains can process and be changed by ground-consequent logical relationships.
To achieve consistency, we must either deny that everything is governed by cause-and-effect, and open our worldviews to something beyond physicalism, or we must deny that our brains are influenced by ground-consequence reasoning, and abandon the idea that we are rational creatures.
Ask yourself: are humans like falling dominoes, entirely subject to natural law, or may we stand up and walk in the direction that reason shows us?
http://www.reasonsforgod.org/2.....nd-reason/
Self-refutation and the New Atheists: The Case of Jerry Coyne – Michael Egnor – September 12, 2013
Excerpt: Their (the New Atheists) ideology is a morass of bizarre self-refuting claim. They assert that science is the only way to truth, yet take no note that scientism itself isn’t a scientific assertion. They assert a “skeptical” view that thoughts are only constructed artifacts of our neurological processing and have no sure contact with truth, ignoring the obvious inference that their skeptical assertion is thereby reduced to a constructed artifact with no sure contact with truth. They assert that Christianity has brought much immorality to the world, yet they deny the existence of objective morality. They assert that intelligent design is not testable, and (yet claim the counter proposition, that life is not designed, is testable).
And they assert that we are determined entirely by our natural history and physical law and thereby have no free will, yet they assert this freely, claiming truth and personal exemption from determinism.,,,
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2.....76541.html
“One absolutely central inconsistency ruins [the popular scientific philosophy]. The whole picture professes to depend on inferences from observed facts. Unless inference is valid, the whole picture disappears… unless Reason is an absolute, all is in ruins. Yet those who ask me to believe this world picture also ask me to believe that Reason is simply the unforeseen and unintended by-product of mindless matter at one stage of its endless and aimless becoming. Here is flat contradiction. They ask me at the same moment to accept a conclusion and to discredit the only testimony on which that conclusion can be based.”
—C.S. Lewis, Is Theology Poetry (aka the Argument from Reason)