Whoa – that pretty much sounds like the problem I had with an otherwise great science fiction novel based on the idea that humans had transmitted the human genome to another galaxy and aliens receiving that used the information to make humans from scratch! My thought was that without two critical things this couldn’t work: mitochondria and how to make them, and the genomes of all the bacteria that live in humans and keep us going.
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That’s a “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” argument where the mind is an “emergent phenomenon”. It fails to account for the ability of human thought to actually convey meaning: if your hardware is nothing more than the interaction of tiny particles with no meaning, you can sum them up all you want and won’t get any meaning.
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The question for the thread was what if a genome didn’t arise from a chain of forbears. If a genome could be built up de novo with the purpose of being perfect, what would be required to reach that goal?
That’s my assessment of Christian theology as well. Physical perfection is not something that is relevant to the central Christian message. Good enough is good enough.
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It is nothing of the sort. You may have heard something similar from people who DO argue that the mind is an emergent phenomenon. But since I don’t believe any such thing then I am clearly making no such argument. My belief is that the mind is a physical (as in accord with the laws of nature) non-biological living organism (i.e. self-organizing) using human language as its information medium rather than DNA, which biological organisms use for their information medium.
This is an effective dualism in an physicalist framework but only with regards to the mind-body problem and not to imply that all of reality is physical only for there is still the duality between spiritual and physical. I am just refusing the Neoplatonist confusion of the mind with the spiritual aspect of our existence.
Living organisms are quite intentional in their actions and organization. Thus the human mind as a living organism certainly DOES account for the ability of human thought to convey meaning. Dualism certainly does no such thing. Making things separate independent existences is no explanation of anything at all, but more of a refusal to explain.
The hardware-software analogy is not bad since these are largely independent creations even though one requires the other in order to function. The difference with mind and body is that living organisms are a product of self-organization rather than design – doing and becoming for their own reasons rather than made to specifications.
And BTW self-organization is certainly not the same as spontaneous generation. One of the important difference is inheritance, whereby what has been learned is passed on from one generation to another. Both mind and body of the individual develop based on an inheritance and one of the ways in which the two living organisms are separate is that the inheritance in these cases are completely different using their own mediums. They also largely have different needs which are sometimes even in conflict with each other. And yet they are also quite interdependent and it is likely that one cannot be separated from the other. This is one of the differences from the dualism of Gnosticism which claims the non-physical mind doesn’t need the body at all and can leave it behind.
One problem: Jesus ate things after the Resurrection, and I see nothing in scripture to suggest that things didn’t go in the usual way. He also talked. Thus nutrition, waste, and respiration seem to be things that will work as they always have. The difference will probably be that we no longer have to eat, or if we do perhaps our bodies will be able to transform whatever we eat into exactly what we need.
I think of it in terms of energy levels – it’s a sloppy analogy, but it gets the idea across: Our bodies now are only capable of operating on the “ground state” where food and drink and air are necessary, but then we will be able to operate on a higher energy level where our cells can draw on the energy they need directly – and we’ll be able to switch back and forth when appropriate.
I would think that if it is “physical” then there would be another sort of energy that we haven’t yet detected and perhaps never will.
But if “human language” is its “information medium” then its options are severely limited! I could see how human language might be what we’re stuck with operating on for now, but ultimately there would be an optimal language for our operating systems.
I think our ideas are really quite the same. Both hold that the mind is more than just biology in the brain; beyond that I think the difference is semantic.
Rather than direct design, anyway; the design is in the systems that allow mind and body to function, i.e. to self-organize.
I dropped in on an open seminar where one professor was arguing that the mind can indeed leave the body behind, but that it would be like having one’s body cut off leaving the brain to suffer from phantom limb and phantom pain continuously – in short, possible but “deucedly uncomfortable”. My contribution was to suggest that as the body without mind can “function” in the most limited sense, the mind without the body would also be quite limited, not merely dealing with phantom sensations but unable to use imagination, learn anything new, remember anything but personal identity, in effect a mental cripple.
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I’m not familiar with the concept or arguments surrounding, and I’m assuming this is a YEC concept… but just offering an educated guess, “perfect” in this context clearly must be connected to “perfect to achieve what its designer intended.”
And if the larger purpose was, at least in part, that “from one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth,” then I would think that said original genome would have been made frontloaded with all the genetic diversity necessary to avoid problems with inbreeding in those first generations, to have the evolutionary flexibility to evolve and adapt and mutate to overcome the various future biological challenges, and to achieve the current genetic / ethnic diversity across the globe that God had intended and that we currently witness.
Great observation – but extending Jesus’ continued existence in his original corporality to ours the same is a bit of a reach.
Since they are conceptually distinct we can think about the possibility of separation coherently. In fact my trilogy of science fiction books do exactly that – supposing we can move the mind to a computer chip and thus travel to the stars with a tiny payload on an enormous ship. But this is just science fiction. Realistically it is much more probable that this is impossible.
BUT even in my sci-fi stories, I never suggest the mind can exist by itself alone. I don’t think that is even coherent. It requires something to do the work of the brain at least for the mind to even exist. It would be like trying to have a body without atoms and molecules. Something needs to take their place. In a computer simulation, the hardware (and software) is doing some of the same work such as spatial relationships and motion. So even in a computer simulation the body doesn’t exist by itself. And if that is true of the body then it only makes sense that the same is true of the mind. It also requires a medium of some kind to exist at all.
No I don’t think that is right. Since I believe the mind is a living organism in its own right, the ability to learn is a part of it. No I think the dependence is much more fundamental. I am rejecting Plato’s idealistic realism. You could say that I am at least somewhat of a nominalist, rejecting the idea of universals existing apart from particulars.
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Actually it’s exactly what we should do: He was “of the same essence as us as pertains to manhood/human-ness”. He became fully like us that we might become fully like Him!
At first glance, each of us only has two alleles per gene. In the modern human population, there are way more than two alleles for many genes. Do you know how this is supposed to work at the DNA level?
I’ve encountered YEC lore that has Eve created with eggs each of unique genotype, and Genetic Entropy contributes more alleles considered deleterious.
This is very ad hoc, but the flood bottleneck is fatal to the idea, as we have plenty of ancient DNA which is irreconcilable with the human population reduced to eight some 4500 years ago.
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And actually just 5 ancestors (Noah and wife, and 3 wives of his sons)
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Here is a (very) loose analogy. America consists of fifty states in union as one nation. Each state retains the capabilities and privileges of “a state” i.e. a nation, subject to a Constitution that both unites and binds them. When there is a major issue, one or a few states may enact statutes to deal with that issue. The passage of a few years usually demonstrates whether that solution is well-founded. Think of this in terms of natural selection. The effect is that the individual states are the laboratory of democracy.
The presence of many competing alleles for any given gene is similar. Natural selection may take a thousand generations to eliminate all of the losers, but that fuzziness of the genome can act as a guard against future environmental challenges.
Not only that, but when no allele manages to foster more progeny that some other (small set of) allele(s) the guardian effect is sustained.
Or in other words all genomes that unfold from an initial cell and lead to a recognizable, functional physical member of a given species are perfect.
This kind of perfection thus has nothing to do with either superiority or uniqueness.
If we start with two genomes (e.g. Adam and Eve) then we only have 4 possible alleles for a given gene, assuming they had diploid genomes like us. This can’t account for the number of alleles we see in modern populations. One infamous example is the HLA genes.
These are important genes involved in tissue rejection associated with transplants. For some genes there are thousands to tens of thousands of known alleles, not 4.
So where did those other alleles come from? Mutations would seem to be the obvious mechanism. But is that “frontloading”?
Therefore, “frontloading” needs to explain how this would work. How are mutations frontloaded, if that is what is indeed happening. Or, how could all of the genetic variation we see now at each gene locus be found in just two individuals?
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That IF defeats the YEC model of the universe, and with it the factuality of Genesis 1 ff. The myriad simultaneous alleles arise from three-plus billion years of continuous evolution. More recently, a mere 20 to 25 million years, the primate limb of the tree of life has expanded into, per my web browser,
376–524 species of living primates, depending on which classification is used. New primate species continue to be discovered: over 25 species were described in the 2000s, 36 in the 2010s, and six in the 2020s.
Here is a layman’s guess about the HLA genes: nothing corrects a DNA miscopy - the likely reason is that the immune system trains on its own genome the better to recognize an intruder cell. Thus a novel HLA gene is essentially immune (pardon the pun) to natural selection.
{{Note that as in all things DNA there will be exceptions - an HLA miscopy could have fatal consequences somewhere along the line.}}
There is an assumption here, that Jesus’ resurrected physical body is identical to his form as part of the Trinity. Recall that Jesus surrendered that to assume the indignity of having a physical body. Heaven will give us perfected bodies, whatever that implies - including bodies that defy our current ability to define them.
For that matter, our fallen physical form tends to dull our imaginations. 
There is no “indignity”! Mankind made to be God’s image for His Creation was not made in indignity but in dignity – having a physical body is how we were made as God’s image!
I don’t even know what this is supposed to mean. Are you suggesting the Mormon heresy, that the members of the Trinity are actually three men?
John1 makes that inference straightforwardly. Jesus chose to endure the limitations of a physical existence, as in debilitating, confining, humble, and so on.
No, but you seem to be by inferring that a wounded physical body is somehow the appropriate permanent form for Jesus.