Life as an Emergent Property.

[peter]

Not sure that this deserves its own thread because it's fairly self evident- but worth thinking about anyway. (Thanks also to Bill Bryson for the method)

If you were able to take a pair of tweezers and pick out your atoms one by one and place them in a pile, you would finish with a pile of disordered atoms that composed the entirety of the material you - but nowhere, either left behind or in the pile of atoms you had built up, would you find the 'life-spark' that animated the atoms in their ordered 'you state'. This must mean that life is an emergent property of sufficiently complex material order mustn't it? Or - wait? Could life be simply an extension of electromagnetic force, now spread in an unorganized manner throughout your atom pile. What is electromagnetic force anyway? Is it 'material'? He'll - does 'life' even exist if it is not accompanied by self awareness. Perhaps it is this, and not the mere shuffling around of matter in the nonconscious state that is the true miracle.

How little we actually know!

[/i]

[Ur Dead]

Put that way.. Kinda leads credit to
Beauty is only skin deep.

Really!! Lets demolecularize it to see if thats true.

[peter]

What's love got to do with it!

[ D'you like that - there's a song in there somewhere!]

Life [seems to me] to bear the same relationship to atoms/molecules as meaning does to letters of the alphabet. It's all about the position man! Emergence in both cases.

[Do I get my Nobel prize now? If I'm out leave it in the shed.]

[Skyweir]

Mate if Trump gets nominated .. I cant see why you cant

[peter]

I'm not sure if that's a comparison I like Sky.

[Skyweir]

And I dont blame you one emergent iota, one atom

... lols, so many lols

[wayfriend]

There's no "life particle".

(But that's the basis of a great science fiction story, isn't it? Something steam punk I would suggest.)

You could point out that all those atoms you talk about are themselves composed of smaller particles in certain relationships, and if you destroy those relationships there's no more atoms. So atoms are emergent properties. The particles that make up those atoms are themselves emergent. To ape a phrase: it's emergent all the way down.

Which is another way of saying: it's alive all the way down.

Which is only what Leibniz was trying to tell us all along when he proposed Monadology.

[Skyweir]

Interesting Wayfriend .. I had to look up both Monadology and Gottfried Liebniz but very interesting.

[peter]

Didn't someone once come up with a weight for the 'life-spark'? A figure of 21 grams springs to mind. Don't know what that was all about.

[Skyweir]

With 6 degrees of separation

[Wosbald]

+JMJ+

Didn't someone once come up with a weight for the 'life-spark'? A figure of 21 grams springs to mind. Don't know what that was all about.

Someone "once came up with" Orgone.

Just sayin'.

And props to WF for the Leibniz ref.

[Skyweir]

mmm.. I learn such a lot from your posts lol Cos I have to look everything you all say up

Orgone is a pseudo-scientific and spiritual concept described as an esoteric energy or hypothetical universal life force, originally proposed in the 1930s by Wilhelm Reich.

[wayfriend]

https://www.historicmysteries.com/the-2 ... ul-theory/

[peter]

Thanks Wayfriend!

Hadn't realised that this theory had such a long history! (Whether the soul and the life-spark constitute one and the same thing I'm not sure; somehow not I suspect. Perhaps Wos has some thoughts on this - I'm betting much has been written on the nature of the soul over the years.

Can I just refer back to another question I posed in my (rather silly) op - the nature of an electromagnetic wave. What is it a wave in? What is it a wave of. All waves we encounter in the physical world have a medium through which they travel. But these waves travel blithely through a vacuum. The once proposed 'ether' is shown to be a no-no, and instead we are to take it that these waves just ........ travel through nothing waving their way along. But nothing cannot wave . If it does it ceases to be nothing and becomes something and I want to know what it is!

[Skyweir]

Sorry to undercut your questions Pete but had to comment on Wayfriends link

https://www.historicmysteries.com/the-2 ... ul-theory/

I find it an interesting experiment but am astounded he only undertook it against 6 individual subjects .. of course we cannot count the one male who died before the weighing apparatus could be applied.

And out of THAT he averaged and posited the weight loss of a soul at 21gms. Also less than compelling evidence ... is the variation between subjects. Yes that the weight loss remained allegedly unexplained is indeed intriguing. But I found even more interesting his use of creative or quasi theological license in identifying the one subject whos weight loss occurred after a whole minute of his death .. as opposed to others whose weight loss was in comparison immediate .. and this is his reasoning ....

I believe that in this case, that of a phlegmatic man slow of thought and action, that the soul remained suspended in the body after death, during the minute that elapsed before its freedom. There is no other way of accounting for it, and it is what might be expected to happen in a man of the subject's temperament.

Nothing more than this makes me question this entire "experiment" .. his preconceived notions of morality and theology. He weighed and judged this man not really knowing him or .... his heart .. his life .. his achievements, accomplishments, or failures and mistakes. Yet a moral judgement he used to rationalise the difference in his results.

I would be interested in knowing if indeed any further research and experimentation has occurred to look at whether or not .. such weight loss is absolute with death.

Now back to your questions Pete

[wayfriend]

That's how science works. You think ideas are rational until you prove they're not.

BTW did anyone see today's Google doodle?

[Skyweir]

Nope

[Vraith]

To ape a phrase: it's emergent all the way down.

Which is another way of saying: it's alive all the way down.

I can probably get behind the first...depending on the details of your larger conception.

But the second is the opposite of what it means.
An emergent property---in this context/usage---is precisely a property of a complex thing that the individual/constituent parts do not have.

Juggling [of a particular species] depends on the existence of a bowling pin [it is necessary]. But a pin is not sufficient, juggling does not arise from the pin, it is not juggling all the way down.

[[a single molecule of H2O is never solid, liquid, gas]]

[wayfriend]

Sky, Google was promoting Leibniz the other day.

Vro, I do believe that every subatomic particle has properties which it's constituent sub-sub-atomic particles do not have individually. And maybe I don't literally mean that this proves that they are alive ... but having emergent properties means that they have the stuff that life is made of, and I find that significant.

[Skyweir]

Sky, Google was promoting Leibniz the other day.

Oh I missed it

Vro, I do believe that every subatomic particle has properties which it's constituent sub-sub-atomic particles do not have individually. And maybe I don't literally mean that this proves that they are alive ... but having emergent properties means that they have the stuff that life is made of, and I find that significant.

That IS interesting wayfriend .. how are subatomic particles are curious but they would be emergent properties would they not. All life is composed of atoms, mass, body even down to the subatomic level ..