Philosophically speaking, life is the ability to move matter or energy at will, and if you want to kill a bacterium you have to prevent it to either destroy its will as encoded in its encoded instructions or its ability to control the movement of matter and energy as in destroying its membrane.
As such the origin of life is in the will of the eternal creator. In fact if you postulate that life was created by God one postulates God to be dead.
This is a novel view and I am trying to get it with the scientific method in mind. Thus, whenever I decide to obtain a precipitate by reacting two solutions, if I understand you, I am controlling the procedure and willfully eliminate chance? Yet here is no other way to prepare the precipitate - so how does chance enter the discussion?
The only rational I can think of, is that you and @T_aquaticus insist the reactants are in motion and somehow chance plays a central role in the so called collisions required for reaction. This to me seems banal as anything above absolute zero has kinetic energy and is in motion. You both can claim that chance causes Na atoms to be atoms and the periodic table may somehow change by chance.
So I guess you may understand why I don’t get it
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
64
Like all of us, none that I’m aware of. You tell me mine and I’ll tell you yours.
T_aquaticus
(The Friendly Neighborhood Atheist)
65
Could you determine beforehand which specific molecules would react with each other? Also, you rarely get one product, so there is probably going to be superoxides such as HO or H2O2 as products. Could you predict which reactions would result in these rarer products? This is the type of chance I think of when I look at these problems.
The entire H2/O2 reaction scheme is known and has been extensively studied. As for identifying each molecule of H2 and O2, I can only reply - you gotta be joking.
Try thinking for yourself. After all, you stated the Christian story to be rationally wrong and “missing “the point””. Then you say that you are not aware of any missing points and that you need to be told why you claimed what you claimed. To ask others to tell you what you think is priceless. Do you need me to tell you what you want to eat as well?
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
68
In other words, as I knew, you don’t know. You can’t point to any rational and faithful deficit.
you are getting better and better
I happily admit that I do not know what you see as rational and faithful deficits in the Christian story. So no points for you claiming that you knew this. Should I know what point you are thinking of? I could point at a lot of rational deficits of common interpretations of the Christian story by others, but not if I do not know what they declare to be irrational in their view.
I would not claim to know that you do not know what you re thinking, but if you carry on like that you might provide me with proof that you don’t
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
70
Na HAH! Iron to iron eh marvin? As you perceptively divined, by Christian story I mean all of it, all interpretations, starting with Jesus’ own, which counts above all until it is de- and re-constructed from His 100% human, enculturated, ignorant limitations in His divinity. How’s that for the beginning of naked thinking?
I think what @mitchellmckain meant is that problem of knowing speed or position. Apparently you know how fast you are thinking or where you are thinking. I am not so sure for either of it myself, particular if some think I ought to know what they are thinking and explain it to them. Could be my thoughts are actually in someone else and I am in their thoughts - but then how fast?.
Better ask @Klax. I think he knows what I don’t know
I think i need an upgrade in my translation module
Divinity or the divine are things that are either related to, devoted to, or proceeding from a god or God.
Hid divinity is easily understood if you understand what being without sin means or what the concept of sin is about. Do you struggle with the concept of “the word becoming flesh” or why Jesus would have been born without sin? What ignorant limitations do you perceive and where?
Better go to work now, COVID is waiting
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
73
The limitations of human ignorance. (And no, I don’t struggle with incarnation except in this jihad) Jesus, God incarnate in, from an ovum, was enculturated in to ancient Judaism. He assumed it. He was right for the wrong reason by post-Enlightenment criteria. He could not argue it today without playing even faster and looser with the TaNaKh than He did. He would have to walk intellectually naked before us. I’m doing that for Him. With Him. The incarnation continues. In us. He isn’t rationally in the OT. He was inspired to see Himself there nonetheless, to assume the mantle from the protevangelium to Second Temple Messianism via the Suffering Servant. He had to. Whether He actually believed it or not. And He must have done; He wasn’t a Renaissance Man… He did not have that transcendent, anachronistic an overview. Despite the OT not being about Him… it was. Divine intelligence at work or what! As the result of His human, enculturated ignorance He couched His preaching all the way up to and including His mission in those limitations. How could He not without losing His humanity? His followers did worse of course. Through a glass darkly without the benefit of being divine except ineffably by the Spirit. We still do. And deny it. No progress can be made while we do that.
NO! I definitely do not mean THAT! Incompatible measurements are not simply about not being able to know things simultaneously. It is about quantum objects not being able to even have those quantities precisely at the same time. Quantum measurements do not always simply acquire information about what they measure, the often alter what they measure so that they have those quantities measured. This is not about hidden variables. That has been established conclusively.
So not Heisenberg then. That you change a system by determining one part of it is a classical problem of statistics, as you change probabilities by doing so. It is not limited to the smallest of particles but just a number problem. It is even applicable to the position of car keys. Just imagine you are in your bed room wondering where you left your car keys. You call to your wife downstairs that you look for your keys and that you think they could be in the hall, the kitchen or the bathroom and you think they are in the hall. The wife tells you they are not in the kitchen but you should look in the bathroom. Why is she right? (apart from that the wife is always right )
At risk of a statistician venturing an opinion on biochemistry …
I envision a long chain self-replicating molecule. Illustrating with the letter sequence “ABC”. This molecule replicates anything it encounters, including itself, and adds it to the chain:
ABCABCABCABCABCABC
Occasionally this chain breaks “/” randomly into two parts, resulting in two chains …
Occasionally a copying error occurs, introducing a mutation "Q"to the sequence …
ABCABCABCAABCABCQABCABABCABCABCAB
Other kinds of mutation are possible too. The replicator is fairly indiscriminent about what it grabs onto and adds to itself. I won’t illustrate any more because it gets very messy.
That’s it. The replicator molecule clearly makes a lot of junk, but some of that junk may be less efficient at reproducing itself. Competition for resources weeds out the less efficient replicator chains. Occasionally, chance may lead to a better replicator.
I do not claim this replicator is life. Not yet. This is still a chemical reaction - not alive, but has key features necessary for life: replication and copying its information forward.
??? The Heisenberg uncertainty principle is a consequence of incompatible measurements. But this is science not philosophy. Heisenberg made a contribution to quantum physics but no it did not stop there with what he discovered. Non-physicists misunderstand because of the special usage of words like “observation” and “uncertainty,” neither of which has anything to do with conscious observers in this science, but about measurements by measuring devices.
Incorrect. The measurement effect is that of coupling massive numbers of particles with what you are measuring. Thus to effect something like car keys, the measurement has already been made.
DNA replication requires a supply of nucleotides plus enzymes DNA polymerase, DNA primase, DNA helicase, DNA ligase, and topoisomerase. So no these molecules do not “replicate themselves.” RNA requires a supply of nucleotides and a set of RNA polymerase enzymes, lipids and proteins, so that doesn’t replicate itself either.
The OP requested my thoughts on the subject, and I responded - with a disclaimer that I am not a biochemist. If it wasn’t clear from context, I’m suggesting something much simpler than DNA, and I didn’t attempt to describe the means of replication.
I can go a little further: The simple replicator I suggest promotes a sort of autocatalytic or autopoiesis reaction. That might involve more than a single molecule. I suggest the basic resource for building copies should be amino acids.
Again, this is not life as most people understand it, but a sort of proto-life; a chemical reaction to kick-start natural selection.
T_aquaticus
(The Friendly Neighborhood Atheist)
79
I will probably mangle the physics even more than has already been done, but here goes . . .
A better flawed analogy is taking a picture of a bullet. You can use a slower shutter speed and measure the speed the bullet is moving at using the blur of the bullet in the image, or you can use very short shutter speed and determine where the bullet was at a precise point in time. However, you can’t precisely measure both speed and position with a single image.
I was actually thinking along spin measurements and how the observation of one changes the probability of the other, thus the example of the keys. I wonder how many figured out why the wife is right and I should look on the bathroom, just because I claimed the keys to be in the hall. If I had said I think they would be in the bathroom she would have said I should look in the hall first and she still would have been right that the key is more likely to be there, just because she was in the kitchen :-). Its a nice brain teaser to get ones head around.
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