Qdogsman

Please read and consider the following open letter I recently sent to an old professor of mine: Dear Jerry, After talking with you yesterday I decided to write this as an open letter to the world. Thank you for your insight; it was good to hear from you again after 45 years. You asked me to be more specific about my question of the existence of a certain theorem, and you suggested that a mathematician who is more knowledgeable in Differential Geometry than you might be better able to help. So I want to open this letter up and get it in front of as many of those mathematicians as possible. Then, to be fair, I thought I should tell you why I am so interested in this "mystery theorem". In thinking about how to do that, I realized that this letter may hold interest for a much wider audience. As a result, I am writing it as an open letter to the world. Without getting into my personal beliefs, I happen to be among those people who believe that there is more to existence than the observable and accessible 4D space-time of science. This puts me squarely in the category of virtually all religious believers, including those who believe in parapsychology, animism, spiritualism, or of other believers in the supernatural of various flavors. The rest of the people, typically including most scientists, believe that our 4D world is all that exists. Since a definitive answer to my question could shed some light on the controversies swirling around the divide between these two categories of belief systems, a search for an answer might be interesting to anyone involved in the debate. In the 1990's I distinctly remembered you proving a "theorem", back in the 1960's, in Differential Geometry that you summed up for the class afterward in a sentence that was very close to, "There you see? You can't have a bent space unless it is an embedded manifold in a space of at least one dimension higher than that of the bent space." I also distinctly remember the impact that result had on me. I at once realized that if our 4D space-time were "bent", then the necessary additional dimension would provide the "space" for God, or angels, or all sorts of other extant but inaccessible beings, places, and structures to exist. During most of my adult life, I wondered how this result could shed light on the profound questions related to the meaning of life. More than that, I wondered why nobody seemed to be taking advantage of the theorem and applying it. Then in the late 90's, I had an experience that shook my faith to the core—my faith, that is, in my own memory. In a discussion on an Internet forum relating to the rift between science and religion, I confidently expressed my belief in the "mystery" theorem. When challenged for a reference, I pulled out my copy of Michael Spivak's Calculus on Manifolds, which I thought you had used in class, and looked for the "theorem". To my shock and consternation, the "theorem" simply was not there. To this day, I can't explain where my memory failed me. You have straightened me out on the question of whether it was you I was listening to. You said it was not. You said you taught Differential Geometry but not at the location where I took the course. My memory of the reference also clearly failed because the "theorem" is nowhere in Spivak's book. Since that classroom experience had such a life-altering impact on me, it is clear that either some other professor, in some other class, proved the "theorem", or that the memory got planted by a dream or in some other mysterious manner. Getting a definitive answer to my question will help put my mind at ease. Please, someone help me. Even though I seem to remember the professor using the term 'bent', I realize that 'bent' is not a well-defined mathematical term. I also realize that the terms 'curve' and 'curvature', while they are well-defined, are not simple concepts. So I am at a loss to answer your first question in response to me: you asked me, "What do you mean by 'bent'?" I don't know. But it is easy to think of an intuitive example of how the "theorem" should hold in some specific cases. For example, you can't "bend" a sheet of 2D paper that is lying on a tabletop without "bending" part of it into the third dimension of the room in which the table is located. The question is, can you "bend" any space without having an extra dimension "in which to bend it"? Assuming that there is an appropriate definition of 'curvature' such that the "mystery theorem" holds, the theorem would say: At least n+1 dimensions are necessary for a particular curvature to exist in an n-dimensional space, and the n-space must be an embedded manifold in the (n+1)-space. If such a theorem exists, it would seem to apply to the current controversy between science and religion. Since from General Relativity we know that our 4D space-time is curved, or "bent" in the presence of energy, if the theorem is true, and if that particular curvature qualifies, then it would imply that a higher-dimensional world exists in which ours is an embedded manifold. The extra dimension(s) would be inaccessible to us and to any of our instruments because everything in our 4D world is made of 3D stuff moving in a 1D time-like direction. Therefore there should be no mystery as to why we don't "see" those extra dimensions, which commonly seems to be the reason scientists don't take the possibility seriously. It seems to me that String Theory, for example, could be greatly simplified if the extra dimensions didn't need to be "curled up" in order to keep them out of sight. Maybe Theodor Kaluza's suggestion to Einstein should be resurrected and pursued without encumbering it with Oskar Klein's compactification. It seems to me that the search for the magic Calabi-Yau space could be shifted from the haystack to the well-lighted ground under the proverbial lamppost. I sincerely hope that someone who can definitively answer my question will somehow provide the answer to me. If that is not you, I beg you to forward this to someone who might understand the question and who might be able to cite the theorem, prove it to be false, or begin working on finding a proof one way or the other. Sincerely, Paul R. Martin Seattle, WA USA

Eclogite, I confess and admit that I was wrong and you are right. I am embarrassed and humiliated. I have been arrogant in my attacks on science. I have commented on subjects of which I am ignorant. I have been disingenuous. I am mistaken and wrong. I was stupid and gullible to have accepted the story told at the tourist attraction at Dry Falls. I have cherry-picked my examples. I have used faulty methodology in evaluating important issues. I am ashamed at my behavior. I am truly sorry for getting you so angry. Thank you for your kind offer to guide me through a few scientific papers. But, as I already explained, I do not have the time. I am sorry for the trouble I caused, but I am also disappointed. For a while, after getting through the problems caused by my stupid choice of terminology, and after explaining and adjusting my objectives for the discussion, I really thought my participation in Hypography was going to be fruitful. And I think it was fruitful until all my interlocutors, except for those attacking my integrity, character, and personality, suddenly stopped responding. This has not been a total loss, however, it helps me better understand people. Thank you for the time and energy you have spent on my posts. Paul Martin Qdogsman

Well Eclogite, I'm sorry I pissed you off and disappointed you. This is getting out of hand. This started by Moontanman pissing me off by falsely claiming that I ridiculed science. Since I knew he couldn't produce any evidence that I ever had, I assumed that he must have been referring to times in which I had criticized science, or scientists in some way. I acknowledged that I had done that, and "off the cuff" I presented my list of 5 examples. These were cases in which I had gotten impressions that injustice had been done. I tried to present them as such, not as facts. The case in point, Wegener's, was a personal impression I had gotten as a result of being personally insulted and ridiculed on the issue. Even though several years later, when I was exonerated, that impression remained. So when I read of cases like Barry Marshall's, and Dr. Money's, and heard the story at Dry Falls, they resonated with me. When I worked in Enrico Clementi's lab, I made a point of finding out for myself whether or not scientists were constrained in what they were permitted to consider so I asked some scientists, as I related in my anecdote, for which I am accused of being a liar. The answer I got was as near to what I related as I can remember. The impression remained. Now I find myself holding speculative opinions that I believe as strongly as I believed in contintenal drift when I was young and science did not yet accept it. I would like to present those opinions to someone, anyone who will listen, and since I am not a scientist, that avenue is not open to me. Internet forums seem to be the correct place, but I find what I consider to be unreasonable resistance to even considering the ideas open-mindedly. When you look at controversial issues, such as the cause of stomach ulcers, whether continents drift, whether boys and girls are different, whether enormous floods occurred, or whether humans cause global warming, they fall into two categories for me. There are those which require specialized scientific investigation to resolve. Those include the questions of stomach ulcers and enormous floods. I am not an expert on these questions and I must rely on science to answer them. The other category, IMHO, is different. In those cases the truth is so obvious that any intelligent lay person can answer the basic question with just a little clear thinking. I was not alone in being the only non-scientist who believed in continental drift. There were untold many others. The question could be answered simply by looking at a globe and doing a little clear thinking. I remained firm in my belief until science finally came around to accepting the truth. I even bought a college geology textbook, "Introduction to College Geology" by Chauncey D. Holmes, pubished in 1962, just so that I would have the official position used by my classmated to ridicule my belief and my thinking. I paid 25 cents for the book. Likewise, any clear-thinking individual, especially those who are parents, believe that there is a difference between boys and girls apart from their anatomy and physiology that is not caused by their upbringing. I can't imagine how Dr. Money was able to perpetuate his fraud for so many years and how the scientific community bought into such a ludicrous idea if they were not cowed into it by artificial prohibitions on their scope of inquiry. And the same is true for AGW. Any person with average or above intelligence can reasonably conclude that it cannot be the case that any human activity causes any more than a negligible and non-measurable effect on climate, and that CO2 is neither a poison nor a pollutant, but instead the source of all the carbon that makes up living bodies, the ubiquitous product of animal life, the vital food for plants, the fun component of bread and beer, and is as benign and non-poisonous as salt or water. No scientific data is required for this analysis. The obvious facts, so readily available to all observers, is sufficient to enable us to draw this conclusion. If you have trouble doing so, one of us should open another thread and I could explain it to you. So that brings us to my recent participation in this forum. Being a non-scientist, and one who doesn't have time to read, or to learn to read, scientific journals, I have formed opinions on some questions concerning abiogenesis, evolution, religion, and consciousness based strictly on clearly observable phenomena. In the same sense of drawing obvious conclusions, or at least arriving at what I consider to be promising hypotheses, that I did about gender differences, continental drift, and AGW, I have reached the same conclusion Bishop Paley reached, but based on information he didn't have. I have the benefit of a layman's view of molecular biology as it is understood today. My essay, which got me back into Hypography, was my attempt to present my argument. As the result of some fruitful discussion, for which I am grateful, I have changed my position. I have abandoned comparisons with digital systems and replaced them with comparisons with symbolic systems. I have also made it clear that my objective is not to convince anyone that my thesis is correct, but instead to make the case that science should present no prohibition, either express or implied, to the thoughtful consideration of a mind being an instrumental part of the origin of the genetic code, or of life, or of the universe itself. I had, and still have, the strong feeling that such prohibitions exist. In the escalating anger aroused by Moontanman's assault on my character, to my hasty response, to your anger at my hasty response, that led us to this point, the crux of the issue is now exposed. To paraphrase Shakespeare, methinks you might be protesting a little much. If Moontanman is right, that he has heard a version of my anecdote many times, it tells me that many scientists maintain a list of sacred cows in their desks. It is the existence of those lists that I think is preventing science from advancing. Thank you for your active, thoughtful, and energetic attention. I do appreciate it. Paul Martin Qdogsman

Eclogite, Thank you for taking the time to respond so completely to what appears to be a comment of mine based on ignorance and sloppiness (there was no component of biased argument because I am not biased against science in the slightest). I am not inclined to spend any time researching the facts to try to defend what I wrote. I could be completely wrong, as you claim. My total knowledge is based on a single visit to the tourist attraction at Dry Falls, watching a movie there, and listening to the rangers tell the story. Since the story they told seemed to me to be another example of the problem I was trying to illustrate with my 5 examples, I included it. Evidently I was wrong. I apologize and retract that example from my list. In order to keep my number at 5, and to keep within the discipline of Geology, I might suggest substituting the story of "The Map that Changed the World", a wonderful book written by Simon Winchester. This story is an example of the criticism I tried to back up with my 5 examples. Of course in the case of William Smith, whose story is told in that book, this took place in Britain many years ago and it was the British Royal Society who treated him so shabbily, not the Geological Society of America. (Incidentally, the book makes the case that, rather than a mantra, William Smith "almost alone, created the science of Geology".) I'm not sure how to correct my error in the other thread. Will this retraction and apology suffice? Or should I post a mention in the other thread? Yes, I think I was speaking on behalf of Bretz. My visit to Dry Falls was a long time ago and my memory of it is vague, but the name 'Bretz' does have a familiar ring. My recollection is that Bretz was more-or-less the hero in the story related to me, and if he had to do the work to identify Missoula, then it adds weight to my old erroneous interpretation. It only means that the official Geological Society took longer than I thought to finally accept the idea. Of course there should be a balance. Crackpots need to be held at bay, but new ideas and approaches should not be religiously excluded either. I think that by occasionally highlighting egregious cases, like I tried to do with my list of 5, it might help keep things in balance. So what about my four other examples? Were they OK? Paul Martin Qdogsman

For the benefit of you readers who might have been following Moontanman's attack on my credibility, let me add a few details. The conversation I related in my anecdote took place in an IBM laboratory in Kingston, NY between January 20, 1985, when I first arrived at that laboratory, and May 11, 1985 when I left for the final time. That was a great many years ago, decades in fact. When Dr. John Detrich pulled that sheet of paper out of his desk drawer, he referred to it as his "list of sacred cows". I admit that he did not use the terminology of "FTL". I regrettably chose that term for brevity and familiarity. The actual term written on John's sheet was "superluminal". I don't remember the noun it modified, but it was something like 'travel', or 'velocity'. (As I said, it has been many years.) Professor Roothan did his work at the University of Chicago. The laboratory was run by Dr. Enrico Clementi, an IBM Fellow. I suspect that just as the much-ridiculed term 'continental drift' was replaced by the acceptable term 'plate tectonics' by the scientists who were forced to accept a paradigm shift, the term 'superluminal' might have been replaced by 'FTL' after a similar shift. This is my first experience at being called a liar to my face in public, and it does not sit well with me. (My ex-wife called me a liar in public, but she did it behind my back. That didn't sit well with me either.) I fully expect that any idea I express will, and should, be doubted, questioned, challenged, and debated. That, to me, is the useful purpose of a forum like this one. But I don't expect to be insulted by having my personal integrity impugned. At the first hint that Moontanman's poison has influenced other contributors, you will have heard the last from me on this forum.

Yes, I actually had that exchange myself with the people I named and two or three others. Absolutely not. I agree, respect goes both ways. It appears to be going in only one direction at this point. Since you doubt my credibility, there seems to be no reason for me to say anything further to you. But thanks anyway for your comments.

(Continued from previous post) Again, because I have abandoned the use of the term 'digital' I think we can step around your claim here. The key claim I made in my essay is that the codons that appear in DNA and mRNA can be seen as symbols, both in the sense of Buffy, as a useful interpretation by microbiologists, and in the sense of my essay as symbols that appear to have been deliberately chosen by a designer and which were mapped to amino acid groups. One of us is mistaken here Craig, so one of us stands to learn something. If I'm not mistaken, Tryptophan, coded by TGG, also maps a single codon to a single amino acid along with Methionine. Either way, it makes no difference to my argument. I agree completely. In fact, that is the only relevant question. Could I ask you to go back and read my paragraph a little more carefully? And, of course you need to revise it and replace 'digital' with 'symbolic'. When I talk about a "grid", I carelessly introduced the term 'grid' without defining it. My apologies for that. What I meant was some abstract imaginary "grid" that I wanted my readers to visualize that would be similar to a page spelling out the Morse code. The "grid" for Morse Code would have a column of letters down the left side and dots and dashes in a corresponding column down the right. But the "grid" for the genetic code would be a grid of 64 boxes, each representing a unique codon and having the name of one specific amino acid in each box. At this point in the discussion I simply wanted the reader to have an image of this "grid" in mind in order to understand the informational requirement for the genetic code. Then I remarked that "I don't know where that grid is, or was,...". By that I meant that this "grid" is simply an imaginary grid I asked my readers to conjure up in their minds, (and of course in the back of my mind, I imagine that an original designer would have had such an imaginary grid also) but when considering what might have been going on physically when the genetic code got established in the DNA in the form of those 60-odd sequences, I don't think there was a sheet of paper lying around anywhere that had that 64-box grid drawn out on it. Next I said that "...nor can I imagine how any physical process could make use of it if it did exist....". By that I meant that if there really did happen to be a primordial sheet of paper lying around with the genetic code described in such a grid drawn on it, I can't imagine how that sheet of paper with its diagram could be useful or instrumental in any chemical process that led to the ultimate construction of those 60-odd sequences. Now you can substitute any other possible physical storage medium to replace my primordial sheet of paper, and it is still unimaginable to me how it could influence or aid in the origination of the genetic code in some strand of DNA or RNA. Finally, the last sentence, to which you objected: "After all, the filled out grid is [symbolic] and its representation has nothing to do with any physical processes." You insisted that, "The mapping of codons to amino acids does have something to do with physical processes." You are absolutely right that the mapping, represented by the correct pairing of codons with amino acid receptor configuration at the end of each tRNA, does indeed have something to do with the physical processes that go on in a ribosome. But what I was talking about was that abstract "grid" that exists only in the observer's mind, or in the designer's mind, or in some diagram on a sheet of paper, or other such representation. That "grid" does not enter into any physical process. That was all I meant. We agree here. I agree. There is nothing symbolic about the RNA codon. There is even nothing symbolic about the entire tRNA molecule including the codon and the receptor configuration with its attached amino acid. There is nothing symbolic in any chemical reaction or process. The only symbolism that occurs is in some conscious mind. That can occur, as Buffy and Moontanman have pointed out, in the mind of an observer like a molecular biologist who finds it convenient to designate certain patterns and configuration as symbols and codes to help in understanding. It can also occur, as I have been pointing out, in the mind of a designer who finds it convenient to define symbols and use them in the design process. Some symbols can even be incorporated into the physical system that is being designed, like numerals and bit patterns in a computer, and like, as I suspect, codons in DNA and RNA. I'm not sure what all you include in your category of "molecular machines", but the only molecular structure to which I ascribe special significance in this sense is the special codon in the middle of a tRNA molecule which is the one used by the ribosome to match the codon in the mRNA. That, to me is best understood as a symbol, both by observers like us who use it as a key in the genetic code, and by the original designer who used it for the same purpose and who actually built it into the tRNA antecedent in DNA. I'm afraid you have stretched my failed "stone analogy" beyond any usefulness. It didn't work all that well when I tried to use it to explain a point about information. But I don't consider the stone to be analogous to any molecule of any type in any way. I agree—molecules aren't like that. Good. True. I have never appealed to complexity in my arguments. I have not made that argument or that assertion. I agree. On the contrary, I think it is good that we critically examine what each other writes. That's the only way we can learn. Thank you for writing.

Wow! Thank you, Craig, for all the time and thoughtful effort you put into your response. I hope I can do it justice. Once again I must apologize for my sloppy language. Two examples appear in the above quote. First, is my unconventional definition of 'digital'. Near the very beginning of this thread I acknowledged that mistake and took steps to correct it. I no longer stand by my earlier use of the term 'digital' and have replaced it with the terms 'symbol' and 'symbolism' in an attempt to capture my originally intended meaning. Secondly, I unfortunately was too glib in saying that I was "not interested in" self-replicating molecules. I am most assuredly interested in that topic. What I meant by my remark was that I didn't think that topic was directly relevant to the point I was trying to make in my essay. Let me try to clear that up now. The difficult problem I am trying to focus on is the problem of the origination of the genetic code. When I drill down trying to isolate the equivalent of Morse's "codebook", that is a physical structure that contains the collection of symbols (the codons) used in the code, along with the pair-wise mapping from those symbols onto the set of objects they represent (the individual amino acid groups), I learned that it is found in the set of 60 or so sequences within the DNA. So the challenge I present is to explain how that set of sequences came to exist originally. My thesis is that an explanation including the mind of a designer is much easier to accept than a mechanism or process that does not include a mind. Now I have caused confusion in my essay, and in this discussion, by using confusing terminology and by tacitly or otherwise categorizing various related concepts into the wrong categories. I have been accused, for example, of conflating Darwinism with abiogenesis. I stand guilty as charged on that issue, although I am still at a loss as to how to correctly categorize the specific topic I want to discuss. I have learned that the origination of the genetic code is not part of Darwinism or Modern Synthesis. I have been told that it belongs in the category of abiogenesis. Now you seem to be saying that abiogenesis is the origination of self-replicating molecules. The problem, as I see it, is that the term 'abiogenesis', from its etymology, seems to imply that the term refers to the origin of life, and at the moment there is no agreed-upon definition of the term 'life'. If 'life' simply means self-replicating structures, then your interpretation seems to fit. But then again, it does not seem to me to cover the origination of the genetic code. It seems to me that the original self-replicating structures might have been DNA or RNA or maybe even something more primitive. But whatever the case, DNA structures must have existed, and been busy replicating, prior to the establishment of those 60 very special sequences of codons which somehow originally got written into at least one of those early strands of DNA. My point is that even though I want to focus on, and discuss, the possible methods of the origination of those special sequences, I am by no means disinterested in other questions, some of which may fall within the scope of abiogenesis and some of which may fall into other arbitrary categories. So, substituting 'symbolic' for 'digital', where 'symbolism' is defined in an earlier response I made to Buffy, my three statement syllogism becomes, Mind is required in order to produce a symbolic system, We find symbolic systems in living organisms Therefore mind was required to produce life Again I apologize for causing so much confusion. With my change in terminology, and with my definition of what I mean by 'symbolism', then premise 1 is true by definition and thus can't be refuted by abiogenesis or any other argument. But there is another change to my syllogism induced by one of Buffy's cogent arguments. She has convinced me to change premise 2 to say, "We find what appear to be symbolic systems in living organism." and 3 to say "Therefore it appears to at least some observers that mind was required to produce life." (I didn't say that expressly to Buffy, but if you read our conversation you will see that we came to that agreement.) It may seem that I have caved and weakened my position, and to some extent that is true. But the new version of my syllogism should now be considered by all present discussants to read, Mind is required in order to produce a symbolic system, We find what appear to be symbolic systems in living organisms. Therefore it appears to at least some observers that mind was required to produce life. So, again at Buffy's suggestion, I have softened my appeal. Instead of trying to convince my readers that mind was necessary for the origination of the genetic code, I am now trying to convince you, my readers. that since it sure looks that way to me, I think it would be a good idea for you to look at the possibility and see if it looks that way to you too. I am only asking you to expand your horizon and open your mind. If we would not be having this conversation, it would not be for a lack of my trying on my part. I would still be pushing for a conversation discussing the origination of the genetic code. But I'm not sure I understood your scenario. The confusing part is the construction "DNA-using". By that did you mean DNA structures which use biological organisms? Or did you mean that the experiment quickly produced RNA and DNA and your hyphen indicates a condition on the experiment i.e. that it "us[es] biological organisms"? If the former, you might mean that DNA uses biological organisms in the sense of Dawkins in which genes "use" organisms in order to propagate themselves. If the latter, then how do you see biological organisms playing a role in the experiment and wouldn't that qualify for Buffy's always-ready "circular argument" rubber stamp? I agree. It would also force the issue of coming to an acceptable definition of 'life'. But I would still be in there clamoring to know whether the outcome of the experiment established a symbolic genetic code or not. I have no problem acknowledging that, but in the sense of "disinterest" that I already explained, I am not too interested in how subject matter gets categorized by people who make their living working within their defined bounds. Personally I find that delightful. But it appears to annoy some moderators, so I think we should at least try to stay on topic. With respect, and in the spirit of staying on topic, the digital/analog dichotomy is far enough off topic, especially since I have abandoned the use of the terms in my essay, that I think we should not belabor it. I think your connotation of the terms is even narrower than my connotation as meaning symbolism. Furthermore, your definition is really that of 'numeral' which, though interesting, is even further off topic for this thread. So even though you have presented an interesting discussion of the approach, I will not comment on it further. . . . (to be continued in a second post)

I don't know what to say, Moontanman. This post is not in character for you. It is so disjoint, rambling, off-topic, and non-sensical that I just don't know how to respond. I could, I suppose go through it line by line and give you my impressions and questions. For example, I could explain that I have no intent of ignoring your argument, or you, and don't plan to. I believe I have responded in detail to all questions you have put to me. But this post of yours is something else again. For example you seem to think that you and I are in a disagreement over whether or not DNA is information. I have never claimed that it was, nor have I ever claimed that it is not. I don't know where your indignation over the question comes from. I think what I'll do is take the opening you presented to me. Since you admit that you defer to Buffy, and since all of my quotes that you included in your post were directed at her, I will continue the conversation with her. You are welcome to follow along if you like. That does not mean that I am ignoring you or your posts. I have spent quite a bit of time trying to make sense of this one, and as I said, I am at a loss as to how to respond in a meaningful way. But thanks for your interest and your comments just the same. Paul

I'm not sure the moderators will approve of this departure from the topic in following up on Moontanman's question about attractors, but since you mentioned "the appearance of tRNA" in your response I need to set a couple things straight. The Wikian you quoted took some liberties in simplifying the explanation which are not quite correct. An attractor is not a mathematical concept in the sense of mathematics. That is, it is not a primitive concept, nor a defined concept, nor a postulate, nor any other formal concept. Instead it is an informal name given to an observation that looks interesting. In plotting the solutions to various differential equations on a diagram representing a vector space, there are cases where the solutions form the patterns that blamski described. Humans, when looking at these patterns, liken them to the behavior of particles drawn to some "attractor" such as a magnet or a gravitating body. Thus the name for the observed feature. This reminds me of the criticism I have been recently addressing, that my description of tRNA as being a "codebook" is simply a name humans have given to some chemical configurations which react strictly according to the laws of physics and have nothing to do with "codes". I have agreed with this criticism from the standpoint of an outside observer after the mechanism of life is in full swing. But I remain adamant in my position that tRNA is indeed a codebook if it was deliberately designed by a mind. And, in fact, it does look an awfully lot like a code, and is considered so by molecular biologists. But that's all grist for the on-going debate. Here you might be jumping into waters a little over your head. I have no doubt that you see a parallel, but beware of illusions. Let's look closely at what you say is a parallel. First, on the mathematical side, as I mentioned, there is no "factor" involved that causes anything like an attraction. There is only the pattern of curves on a plot that happen to converge in a pattern that suggests a vortex, or other pattern that looks like something is pulling the curve. This would be like looking at the plot of a parabola with the opening to the top and observing that it looks like it is full of some fluid that is making it sag downward. To make a parallel similar to yours, we could define a "heavy fluid" as something that seems to make that parabola sag. Secondly, on the biochemical side, let's look at what you say: Admitting that neither of us can be sure of much at all, I am sure that there is *not* a set of equations for the explanation of the patterns of nucleotides in tRNA in organic chemistry. It would be an utter waste of time to begin looking for them. What needs to be explained is the appearance of those two special sequences of nucleotides (the codon in the middle and the amino-acid bonding structure at the extreme end) in each of the 60-odd species of tRNA, each pair consistent with the genetic code assignment, separated by thousands (I'm not sure of the exact number, but it is many) of nucleotides, each such pair being exactly correct in each of the 60 or so sequences. That is what you need to explain coming into existence without the aid of a mind. This kind of hand-waving doesn't explain much. I agree with you that this explanation fails miserably. We need something else. I agree that chemical bonds took place, as they commonly do. But claiming that they "became attractors" is appealing to a non-existent concept, as I explained above. There is nothing in the mathematical notion of "attractor" that can be used to explain how those tRNA sequences got established. Now think about that for a minute. Let's say that there "were a huge number of these bonds and compounds" and that somehow each specific configuration were in a position to make a test so that we can judge whether or not it was "successful". I see two huge problems here. First, we have to explain the formation of this "huge number" of bonds and compounds so that they are ready to make their respective "tests". In a laboratory we might set up arrays of test tubes, or of micro reaction chambers, or whatever. But out there in the soup of the ocean, there would only be the widely dispersed, randomly occurring, collections of chemicals to provide this testing apparatus. I suppose it is conceivable, but IMHO it takes a lot of stretching. Secondly we have to explain how a test result is judged to be "successful". Let's say a particular test was close. Say that 59 of the tRNA sequences happened to be correct and the 60th one had an error in it somewhere. Well, we could easily judge this one to be unsuccessful because it couldn't participate in any successful protein synthesis. But that is not so much because of the error but because, putting the horse in front of the cart, the tRNA sequences must be established before the protein synthesis apparatus (ribosomes etc.) can operate. But now what if the test were successful? That would mean that we had produced a string of 60 nucleotide sequences which correctly embodied the genetic code. So now how would it proceed? That genetic codebook is now ready for use by ribosomes. Did they already exist, floating around in the soup just waiting for the codebook to arrive so they could do something? Or does the successful codebook have to hang around waiting for ribosomes somehow to develop? It's hard for me to imagine any plausible scenario. I'll leave that for you or someone else to provide. With all due respect, the fact that there were a huge number of these tests and myriad organic chemicals floating around in the soup doesn't quite solve the problem. Thanks for your thoughts and for your contributions to this thread.

True enough. I disagree. That assumption was the basis for Euclid adopting his 5th postulate. The resulting Euclidean geometry that he developed probably added more to the sum of human knowledge than any other single contribution by anyone. Could you be more specific and cite a case in which that assumption retarded human knowledge? I am unaware of any such cases. I am surprised at how categorical you are in your pre-judgment. I am tempted to make a pre-judgment on how open or closed your mind is, but I won't. Thanks for your thoughts.

Sorry this is late. For some reason it didn't take the first time I posted it - Paul Thank you for taking the time to explain neural nets, although it was quite unnecessary for this discussion for the reasons I hope I have made clear in this post. Buffy, Buffy, Buffy! If you had only said that you are familiar with the Mandelbrot Set, I would have taken you at your word. But when you present an erroneous formula and claim that it produces the pretty pictures, I have to wonder. The correct formula is zn+1 = zn2 + C This is an iterative formula, as you may or may not know, and C is a constant for each iteration. Each iteration, for a given C, determines whether or not C is in the M'set or not, by its convergent/divergent behavior. If it converges, C is in the set. If not, then the rapidity with which it diverges is used to place it in a band and assigned a color on the resulting diagram. One such iteration produces the color for one, and only one, pixel on the final picture. C must be changed to cover the entire picture, most easily done in a raster pattern, and the iterative process performed in each case to produce the pixel color. So even the correct formula does not produce the picture. It takes a lot of computation using that formula and some artistic choices for the demarcation of the bands and the choice of colors in order to produce a pretty picture. . . . . My wife wants me to walk around the lake with her so I'm going to speed through the rest of this. No, I have agreed with that. But from the design standpoint, it is a codebook. And the whole system makes much more sense interpreting it that way. Probably so. OK. I will. I conclude that the designers were far from perfect or omnipotent. Yes. That's my complaint. That has been a good strategy for a long time. Science also eschewed anything they couldn't observe so they kept Democritus' idea of atoms religiously pushed aside until people like Thompson and Rutherford pushed their noses into it and forced them to accept the reality of something they couldn't see. The time is ripening for the same sort of extension to the scope of science so that it takes on the interesting problems involving mind, consciousness, and other mysteries of life like its origins. How about, because it is an obvious and comprehensible idea? Gotta go. Thanks for your thoughts.

I am not well-read on this subject (I don't read peer-reviewed journals), but I am not aware of "all sorts of theories and hypotheses" that purport to explain how those DNA sequences coding for the tRNA molecules originated. If you know of any, please inform those of us who don't. I have not, and do not, reject any theories. I think all theories should be considered and scientists should investigate each one in the attempt to confirm it or deny it. What I object to is scientists refusing to consider any theory that includes a mind that is instrumental in the origins of life, the universe, species, etc. etc. That's a fair enough criticism. The closest I think I came so far was simply to declare that it would be easy to explain. By that I mean that we have ample examples of human minds creating all sorts of artifacts so I think it would be (relatively) easy to explain if life were created in a similar mindful way. And we know pretty much how the creation of artifacts happens with us humans. Some parts of it, like the sudden inspirations are still mysterious, but the brute work of taking a set of requirements and designing a solution, building a prototype, proving the concept, inventing the jigs and fixtures, or whatever other supporting apparatus is necessary, setting up the fabrication and assembly facilities, running the raw materials in, and catching the artifacts as they drop out the other end is fairly well known and understood. And in all of this, from end to end, there is a huge amount of symbolic information that is used at all stages from the first glimmer of an idea to the final distribution and maintenance of the final product. I was told that the documentation necessary to build a Boeing jetliner far outweighs the airplane. And the paperwork doesn't include the myriad conversations, phone calls, emails, and other symbolic communication that is instrumental to completing a creation process. So knowing this, and assuming that the creators do not have a magic wand and can no more create artifacts out of nothing simply by an act of will than we can, it is reasonable to assume that the creators need to use similar methods to what we humans use. I will stop here hoping that that much satisfies your request, blamski, but at the risk of running afoul of the moderators, I will briefly sketch out some personally held views on additional details that I suspect are involved. I think there are probably some imperfect, limited beings who exist in some sort of hierarchy of higher-dimensional space who have technology as different from ours as a GPS equipped smart phone is from a Conestoga wagon. Using this, they figured out how to get the universe and life going. I'd be happy to provide more details, but that should suffice for now. I might add that greylorn has done a lot more work developing his ideas than I have. I should (and will) let him speak for himself if he wants. If you really want to learn about his ideas, buy and read his book. Or, to get a brief glimpse, read my review of his book on Amazon.com. And if you get that far, follow the link to see all of my reviews and spin down to my review of Pinker's "How the Mind Works" and read that to get a better idea of what and how I think. If you do that, make sure you follow the comment thread on that review. And, of course, if you want me to explain anything else about my beliefs and ideas, just ask right here.

Good point, Moontanman. I have been a little sloppy in my description of the problem. You are right that scientists don't necessarily reject the possibility or a creator. And it's not even so much of a problem that some scientists deride those who entertain the possibility. The problem is the prohibition that science places on its membership of including the notion of a creator in any published work. (I hope our moderators will allow a short anecdote.) I had the occasion to work closely with a group of high-powered scientists helping them apply as much computer power, as was then possible, to their quantum chemistry problems. I worked among them for several weeks and got to know some of them quite well. I once asked some of them whether or not there were any express or implied prohibitions against subjects they could discuss in their formal work. Dr. Detrich looked up at me from his desk, slowly opened a file drawer and pulled out a sheet of paper. He said to me, "Yes, I keep a running list of them to make sure I don't slip and accidently get myself into trouble." I didn't read the list in detail but I happened to notice that FTL travel was on the list. At the mention of this, Prof. Roothan chimed in and said something like, "Oh pooh. That's baloney. I published a paper myself discussing FTL travel." Then Detrich, or someone else asked him, "Have you published anything since?" Roothan, paused, looked up, then down, and then as if surprised, said, "Well, no." But then he quickly added, "But that was about the time I switched my interest from chemistry to computers." A few people murmured, "Mmmm hmmmm." The point is that constraints of this type tend to move science dangerously close to becoming a religion. I'm afraid it's already happened in the area of climatology. Good question. I suppose it would depend on whether or not the life-chemistry was carbon based and if so, whether it utilized DNA, and of course if so whether the genetic code was the same as ours, and if any of the body types resembled ours. What we would have would be a huge amount of new information that might suggest answers to some of our current questions and raise completely new ones. It would be very exciting. But as for the idea of a creator, I think it would be a huge mistake to try to make sense of all that new information without considering the possibility of a creator or creators.

You seem to be caught up in a problem of your own making. If the subjects being discussed fall outside some bound you have established, or if some title does not match your expectations, then by all means tell me how I can comply to help mitigate the problem. But until you give me that kind of direction, I will focus my attention on the subjects of the conversation as it unfolds. This seems to me to be an arbitrary, and problematic, categorization of topics. Is it only the origin of life (and I presume the origin of the genetic code, which is the topic under discussion here) that you would move out of the category of Modern Synthesis, or would you exclude all other origin-related mysteries? For example would you exclude the origin of consciousness? How about the origin of body types which seemingly miraculously appeared during the Cambrian explosion? If we sweep all the hard questions into another bucket, then we severely reduce the explanatory power of Modern Synthesis. And if we likewise exclude the question of the origin of species, then we definitely have diminished the theory of evolution by disqualifying a very title chosen by C. Darwin himself. And, beyond origin-type questions, there are a host of hard questions related to consciousness, such as the periodic loss of consciousness due to sleep that I mentioned earlier. Are we to exclude these as well? Your categorization scheme is not at all clear to me, so as I said, I won't pay too much attention to it unless prodded by you and I will concentrate on interesting dialog on interesting questions. That seems to be a reasonable position if you are breeding dogs. But if you are interested in understanding life and how it came to be what we see, then I think you have to tackle the hard problems as well as the easy ones. That may be a difficulty for you, but as I said it doesn't matter too much to me. Ummm. OK. If that is your wish, I'll try never to mention those two terms again in this thread. As always, I am grateful for, and thank you in advance for, any time and attention you pay to my ideas. Not to worry. I am out of town from Tuesday through Thursday every week and I have not yet caught up with the thread as a result of my last absence. My delays in responding do not indicate a lack of interest either. I just hate those inconvenient deaths. I think an open mind is accepting nothing and being open to investigating everything.

Thank you for doing so. I think you have constructed an elaborate mis-construal of what I wrote. I am unfamiliar with "the information argument" but if it has anything to do with Shannon's Information Theory, then it doesn't apply. I do not agree with Shannon's definition of 'information' because he leaves out what I believe is a crucial component: the involvement of consciousness. But that is off-topic so I'll leave it there. As I have laboriously explained to Buffy, I do not make such a concession. Most true. I look forward to the day when scientific researchers do the investigation necessary to arrive at the conclusion that a non-human mind was necessary for the origination of life, not to mention the observable universe itself. Thanks for your interest and your comments.

Yes. It doesn't contribute directly, but by opening up new possibilities for inquiry, it opens the way for those new inquiries to produce new knowledge. I disagree. Think about the many mysteries in ancient times that had to do with vital issues affecting survival. It was believed that the heavenly bodies influenced the behavior of earthly processes and events. As a result of these (now known to be ludicrous and erroneous) beliefs, a great amount of attention and energy was spent studying and documenting the positions and movements of the stars, planets, etc. This data proved to be instrumental in the discoveries of Kepler and Newton. I agree. You seem to be supporting my position here. Since new questions are brought to light, it only makes sense that we should begin investigating them. We need to open our scientific horizon, not close it off. My point exactly. We need to identify and explore those new areas of questioning. I am surprised and somewhat dismayed that you could have inferred that "need" by what I have written. I am not aware of any time I have ridiculed science. I have been critical, however, even extremely so, when I discuss egregious examples of where the official scientific community deliberately suppresses the work of sincere investigators who are working outside the official scientific bounds. Here are some glaring examples of this: 1. Barry Marshall was vigorously opposed by the official scientific "consensus" in his efforts to prove that stomach ulcers could be caused by bacterial infection. It seems highly unlikely to me that the huge business in manufacturing and selling anti-acid pills did not have a large influence on how grant money was spent, which in turn motivated the scientific "consensus" to take the position they did. In desperation, Barry courageously took it on himself to swallow a concoction containing Helicobacter pylori, thereby causing him to contract a severe case of stomach ulcers, which he subsequently cured with anti-biotics. Although he was treated shamefully by official science, he was at least subsequently rewarded. 2. I am doing this off the cuff so forgive me for not knowing names, dates, details, etc. but there was a father-son team, I believe, who were convinced (as I too was at the time. (In fact I was personally ridiculed by classmates who were studying Geology at the time and being put down for being so ignorant of the "true" geologic processes.)) that the continents had drifted apart. The official science community vigorously opposed his investigations and caused him a great deal of difficulty, until he finally produced the proof that he was right. He didn't get the credit as far as I know, and science cleverly changed the name from the much derided "Continental Drift" to the official and respected name of "Plate Tectonics". Again, shameful. 3. There was a guy, forgive me again for forgetting his name, who spent virtually his entire adult life studying the barren landscape of central Washington state. He was convinced that the topography was formed by an enormous flood event. Again, the official science community gave him no support whatsoever and instead placed impediments in his way. It was only after satellites were able to provide pictures from a high vantage point that it could clearly be seen that indeed a giant flood had taken place and he had been right all along. Then the scientists belatedly entered this forbidden area of inquiry and figured out what had happened and how. (The bursting of a big ice dam near Missoula). 4. One of the most egregious in my opinion, is the case of Dr. Money of Johns Hopkins. He was the official spokesman for the then-current position of official psychology and he had convinced the scientific "consensus" that there was no gender difference among humans (except for some minor and insignificant anatomical and physiological differences) that was not caused by culture. As part of his work in hoodwinking the scientific community, as well as a significant gullible part of the public, he deliberately falsified the data he accumulated relating to a case in which he had botched the circumcision of an identical twin and as a result the unfortunate boy lost his genitalia. Money seized on this rare opportunity to exploit this poor boy and his family and conducted a controlled experiment on them. He had the family raise the child as a girl and I think he did some more surgery to try to achieve the anatomical effect. The deliberately falsified reports of the experiment were used for years to bolster the stupid and false position of official science until the boy finally rebelled (some years before his eventual suicide) and the truth came out. Most shameful. 5. Now we have the absolutely stupid position taken by official scientific "consensus" that human activity is causing global warming. Since there is so much money involved here (much more than that of the drug interests in the H. pylori case) the official scientific "consensus" is not likely to admit the facts any time soon. Instead they tried the same ploy as the geologists and changed the name from AGW to "Climate Change". Curiously they removed the anthropogenic reference from the name, but they still indoctrinate our youngsters and the gullible public with the ludicrous notion that CO2 is a poison and a pollutant. Again, shameful. In such cases, if I thought ridicule would be an effective approach, I might ridicule such "science". But since I don't think so, I don't ridicule them in spite of how ridiculous the "science" is. Most true.

Good, let's proceed. I am familiar with OOP but not into it. It was invented shortly before I retired and never got into it. I thought it was a bad approach at the time and I still do, but hey, I'm no expert. You'll be happy to know that I have given this a lot of thought, not just since you have written, but for the last 65 years. . . . . I said "If you accept my definitions, then, as my argument spells out, mind is necessary in order to establish the symbolism in which the codon is a symbol." then you said (I have to learn how to do those embedded quotes.) With respect, I think you overlooked the all-important word 'establish' in my statement. I do not know the word 'grafs' (I suspect it might be a contraction of 'paragraphs'; it certainly can't be 'giraffes', can it?) But I need to quickly move on to learn what I am completely missing. No, I am not missing that fact. Refer back to my list of necessary mental capabilities for the design of the genetic code system and look at numbers 1, 2, and 4. They definitely provide the mind with the physical context in which the design is to operate. And number 3 clearly involves the mind dreaming up the various symbols and the role they will play in the eventual system. What you are missing is the fact that I am discussing the mind of an original designer while you want to discuss the mind of an observer of the system long after it has been designed and is now operating. Actually, it is -.-. .- - I have no complaint here. My complaint lies here. You have emphasized my complaint with your capitalization. My complaint is that you insist on referring to us contemporary humans (WE) as the minds we are discussing. I am trying to get you to consider a mind that predates life and was possibly involved in the ESTABLISHMENT of the genetic code (sorry about the use of caps but I followed a precedent). Most true. Good. We may be making progress in communicating. Now let me place your statement in the two different contexts that I am about to turn blue in trying to point out. In your context, i.e. of the minds of interest being those of contemporary human observers, "The symbolism is all imaginary and has no impact or effect on any physical system," In my context, i.e. of the minds of interest being those of the original designers of the genetic code, "The symbolism is all imaginary and has [a serious and long-lasting] impact [and] effect on [all living] physical system," True. But once again, for emphasis, I am not talking about observers; I am talking about designers. Well I suppose that could be construed to be what I am trying to say. To make it correct, I would say that if a mind can identify a "symbol" in a physical system in which the symbol produces an effect as a result of the mapping of the symbol and not as a result of the symbol's physical representation, then the existence... Now, you will no doubt point out that all effects are caused by physical effects, but we observers can distinguish between a mapping according to an arbitrary codebook versus a mapping that depends on the physical characteristics of the symbol itself. If you can't conceive of that difference, it's no wonder I am having such trouble trying to explain myself. Would it help if I agreed to change "evidence" to "a clue" and "must" to "might"? I have been following you and I have been keeping my mind open. But let me use this to make yet another attempt to show the important distinction I am trying to present. Bible codes do not resemble my example; they resemble yours. The "mind doing the perception" in your case is the Bible code reader, the biologist, the human observer. The "mind doing the perception" in my case is the non-human ancient original designer of the genetic code. That's what my essay was all about. Now I can apply my distinction to humans as well, and for the moment forget about the ancient designer. The distinction is between you as a designer of your automatic car (assuming you are the original designer) and the observers of your car as it magically negotiates among the stop signs. Maybe I should encapsulate my argument in a nutshell with due priority given to Paley: We humans are familiar with systems we have designed. We know, if we think about it that is, that for any very complex system that we designed, we must use symbolism in many different forms. Many of those symbols, represented by specific physical configurations, appear as functional parts of our designed systems. We observe the protein synthesis mechanism and see that it uses symbols as functional parts. Since symbols, and in particular functional symbols within a complex system, require a mind, in our experience, it seems reasonable to suspect that a mind was involved in the establishment of the symbolism within the protein synthesis process. That is not a proof but simply an argument that if you dismiss out of hand the possible involvement of a mind in the process of abiogenesis (see how easily I conform?) then you have limited your chances of finding an explanation for a very difficult problem in biology. *certain*??? How can you be so certain? Your sense did not betray you. I am certain of nothing—except for one statement alone. That statement is that "Thought happens". All else I can, and usually do, doubt. (to be continued. I blew the size limit again. Hopefully one more will do the trick.)

Excellent! Clearing up misunderstandings is exactly what I hope we achieve in this conversation. Interesting, I agree. It is even encouraging. You and I seem to be drawing closer to understanding one another. You are correct that the "critical part of [your] statement" is also critical to mine: that mind creates mapping and symbols. Also critical to mine is the notion that it is mind and only mind that creates mapping and symbols. But this still leaves out the most critical part of my assertion. and that is the causal aspects of the creation of a symbolism. That is, in some cases, the one at hand in particular, the creation of a symbol and the appearance of the symbol in some special context, causally influences the behavior of a completely physical system such that the behavior will conform to some intended outcome anticipated by the mind that created the symbolism in the first place. IOW the symbol "causes" something specific to happen that was planned to happen in advance by the mind. Now the "special context" or the "physical system" may contain complex causal chains within it, for example your self-driving car fitted with a neural net computer and a set of servos, which eventually "learns" to stop at stop signs. One symbol in this example is the stop sign. But the mind, which is crucial and necessary, is that of the person who built and programmed the car, the neural net computer, painted the stop sign, and set the whole thing up. Without that mind, the entire system, IMHO, is impossible—unless of course, by some improbable occurrence of a tornado hitting a junk yard, all of the required parts just happened to assemble into a working system. (That analogy is not original with me and probably doesn't represent anyone's idea of a plausible mindless possibility. You may substitute your own favorite mindless possibility if you like). Ahhhh. This helps elucidate our misunderstanding. We see a different "usefulness". You see it as helping the mind understand an observed physical system. And, of course, that's what scientists do so it is natural you would see it that way. But in the abiogenesis context (I have recently learned that that is what we are discussing), the usefulness is in figuring out how to construct the system in the first place so that it will work. It is the kind of symbolism you used when you made your drawings of the self-driving car, the circuit diagrams of your neural net computer, the CAD information you sent out to the circuit board fabricator, the verbal and written conversations you had with colleagues who collaborated on your project, and all the other myriad pieces of symbolic information produced before your ever powered up your self-driving car. These various pieces of symbolism may be useful later on in the sense you described to explain to people at the science fair how your magic car works. They will look at the symbols and diagrams, observe your car in action, and exclaim, "Oh yes! I see how you did it." But that usefulness is completely different, and different in kind, from the usefulness the documentation and communication you and your team used during the development of your project. The former is unnecessary (except maybe to give the judges something to work with) whereas the latter is absolutely necessary for the successful construction of the car and its test track. So, back to my original assertion, it is clear to me that the most plausible way in which the 60-odd sequences of DNA which contain the complements of the various species of tRNA molecules could have been originally constructed, is if some mind decided on the code, i.e. the mapping between codons and amino acid groups, and then somehow (yet to be figured out how) deliberately, with forethought and intent, placed the correct nucleotides in the right places in order to construct the "codebook". After that, the thing runs by itself, like your car, without the mind's involvement. How else could it have happened? I'm not getting your point here, Buffy, except for the fun with your play on words. I have never been impressed with the putative importance of "self-awareness" to the problem of consciousness. I don't think the mirror test reveals much of importance, for example. Off the cuff, here are the aspects of consciousness that I think are important to my argument: 1. Perception – The mind needs the ability to perceive some part of the physical system in which it is working. 2. Understanding – The mind needs the ability to conceptualize cause and effect relationships in the various parts of the physical system. 3. Imagination – The mind needs the ability to conjure up desired configurations and behaviors in subsets of the physical system. 4. Design skills – The mind needs to be able to come up with a workable design to accomplish the construction of the desired configuration and cause the desired behavior. 5. Free will – The mind needs the ability not only to willfully attend to the perception, understanding, imagination, and design necessary to accomplish this project but also to take the steps necessary to implement the design. 6. Deliberate causal influence on the physical system – The mind needs some way of moving, or changing, or otherwise arranging the parts of the physical system in order to implement the design. Whether or not the mind is aware of itself, or even aware of 1 through 6, is unimportant to making this work. Good. I do indeed inextricably link "mind" to "meaning". With respect, I do not think these two are fundamentally different. They are simply two of many thousands of other possibilities for accomplishing the same thing. I don't agree. What is important here is not the appearance of the operation of the system. In your earlier sense of the "usefulness" of the symbols in the system, the observed behavior and the mappings of various symbols to physical parts, is useful to the judges, or to the students, trying to understand your system once it has been designed, built, and now performing. But in my sense of "usefulness", it is the importance of the symbols and the mental activity that were involved in the original conception of the idea, the planning and design of the car, and the actual construction of the car and its support apparatus. In my sense, the origination (design and construction) of the system is what is interesting and under discussion. You want to keep dragging my attention to the operation of the system after it is running. Now I must refute your claim that your neural net system is *undesigned*. Did this system somehow arise in your laboratory without anybody ever talking about it, or writing about it, or proposing a strategy for designing it, or building host systems into which you could load up your self-designing software? If not, then I maintain that all these things constitute a "design". OK. But I hope you now realize that I distinguish between two different uses of mapping: The mapping onto physical actions after the actions have taken place, and the mapping onto future physical actions that are anticipated and partially caused by the mind's will. (I say "partially" because I doubt that the mind can violate the laws of physics (no miracles allowed), so the designer has to be clever enough to exploit seemingly random events and somehow nudge them into compliance with the overall design. I am convinced that QM opens exactly this sort of window of opportunity.) (to be continued. I blew out the size limitations.)

Yes. I agree that these questions need to be asked and investigated using rigorous scientific methods. Speculation is fine for fun or for searching out novel approaches, but serious science needs to be done on these hard questions. Categorically rejecting the possibility of a mind being involved limits the chances of finding the right answers. Good question. As I see it, there are a couple obvious options. One is an absolute origin as you suggest. Another is eternal existence. I suspect there might be some other possibilities. But I'll leave those speculations for another time. Excellent questions. They need to be explored. More good questions. I suspect that as we learn more about exoplanets we will be gathering evidence that will help us answer some of those questions. Thanks for your comments, and don't underestimate yourself. You are plenty smart and you ask good questions. Paul

Well, it's because I never mentioned Bible Codes in anything I have ever written, and from what little I know about them, none of the mechanisms considered and discussed in my essay or responses resembles those Bible Codes in any way. They simply don't apply.

Thanks Eclogite, but do I have to get permission? I thought I was at liberty to start new threads on my own. And if I do need permission, how do I "ask"? Certainly. I have no problem agreeing on that point. As I have said, the Darwinian mechanism, or the Modern Synthesis (a new term to me) is a reasonable explanation for many of the changes we see species undergo. I have no problem with any scheme to categorize questions and subject matter. I just want to make sure it does not turn out to be a shell game in which some of the more interesting questions get shoved aside (like consciousness was during the Skinner heyday). If you want to say that the question of origins is not covered by the Modern Synthesis, fine, but then I will not accept the claim that Modern Synthesis is the foundation for all biology. Biology contains interesting and unanswered questions relating to origins and to consciousness, among others, which I am intending to address. How these questions get categorized doesn't matter too much to me. The question addressed by my essay was the question of the origin of a particular biological structure and whether or not a mind was a necessary component of this origin. You seem to confirm my claim that Darwinism, or Modern Synthesis, does not answer this question. But simply pushing it out of the domain of Darwinism doesn't answer it either. Does that mean that you are not interested in the origin of the genetic code? Or does it mean that my thread is misplaced into the wrong category? If you want to move it, that's fine. But I am interested in the origin of the genetic code and I would like to discuss it in this forum.

Thanks for the welcome, CraigD. I look forward to conversing with all of you. Thanks for the advice, Craig, but I doubt that I would "do better" by re-focusing my attention onto a subject I am not interested in. The only reason I focused on the abstract ideas was to establish a terminology which would allow me to communicate with the forum. I learned that I chose a confusing terminology so I attempted to correct that by being very careful and specific with Buffy about the definitions I meant. I hope that is now behind me. But you are mistaken in what I consider to be the key material assertion of my essay. It is definitely not self-replication, nor abiogenesis. Instead my key assertion is that the origination of the genetic "codebook", as I called it, which is the set of DNA sequences which produce the 60-odd species of tRNA molecules, presents a (IMHO) very difficult problem for Darwinism to explain, while at the same time it presents (what Bishop Paley would love to have found on the beach instead of a watch) a prima facie case for the involvement of a mind. Most true. And I applaud the efforts of researchers who investigate these many alternatives. I only wish that they would not categorically exclude the possibility of an intelligent agent. It is unfortunate that grant money is at risk for people who might open their minds in this way. I am happy that you read my essay, Doubts about Evolution, and thanks for your help with the link. In that essay I tried to point out that the explanations for life include not only the "hardware" aspects, but also the "software". Your discussion of approaches to self-replication and abiogenesis mechanisms fall (IMHO) into the category of "hardware". The parallel I drew in that essay was that of how a CD might have evolved strictly using Darwinian processes (being the "hardware") might plausibly be explained by one or more abiogenesis theories. But the origin of the bit pattern for an operating system stored on the CD (being the "software") would be very much harder to explain. The genetic "codebook", as I have defined it, is an example of some of the "software", and I think it presents a particularly hard problem for Darwinism to explain. Interesting you should mention that. I was recently in a discussion where we attempted to get a measure on the "gap". I pointed out that at the end of the 19th century, the gap was believed to be nearly closed. There were only two unanswered questions in physics and most physicists were confident that they would be solved in short order. Confidence was high. The "gap" was seen as small. But now, since the end of the 20th century, if you asked a physicist about the size of the gap, you would find that we understand about 4% of the matter and energy we believe is "out there", the remaining 96% being dark matter and dark energy, about which we know virtually nothing. Even in biology, Watson and Crick were so confident that they had opened the door to explaining all the mechanisms of life that they dubbed the protein synthesis process, the "Central Dogma of Molecular Biology". It was later realized that the "gap" was much bigger; genes for protein synthesis make up only a tiny fraction of the genome. It was a nice try, though, by biologists to name this "gap" "junk DNA" rather than admit that it constituted a huge gap in our knowledge. So far, this is looking at the gap limited to the playing field defined by science, that is the observable or accessible universe. But even most scientists will acknowledge that there is a sizable "gap" in our knowledge of what might be outside of our light cone. I don't think any, or many, of them would deny that something exists out there, but it is clear that we have no access to it and scientists have been reluctant (until recently, I might add) to even speculate on what might be outside our light cone. But right here in our light cone, we have the phenomenon of consciousness, which science systematically ignored right up until the past few decades. In my opinion, consciousness presents us with "hard problems" that science should take seriously. If they did, it would significantly increase the size of the "gap". And then there is my favorite "gap", which deserves its own thread but I'll mention it briefly here anyway, and that is the space-time in higher dimensions. I believe that one is huge in comparison with all the others. So depending on what you acknowledge as fair and interesting unanswered questions, I suspect the "gap" is growing, not shrinking. And, of course, I think we should leave our minds open for the possibility that some kind of mind is involved in all these gaps. While I'm thinking about it, I would highly recommend Gregory Bateson's "Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity" to help persuade you to open your mind to that possibility.

If that's all you got out of my essay and the following discussion, then I humbly suggest you read it again a bit more carefully.

Thank you, Buffy, for your thoughtful attention and for jumping right back in. You are exactly right; this is the correct starting point. We (I) need to define terms. And, we are already past the starting point. My formal background is in mathematics, so I am uncomfortable starting a discussion without first clearly defining terms. And, in mathematics, there are no magic definitions. That is, there are no words (any longer) which we assume have been given to us somehow with absolute and correct definitions. (That notion was prevalent from at least the time of Pythagoras down to the dawn of the 20th century, when it was finally abandoned by mathematicians.) So in mathematics, each mathematician is completely free to define any term to mean anything he/she wants as long as the definition is clearly spelled out. It isn't completely free, however, in the sense that if the mathematician chooses to make a new and different definition for a term that has been accepted as a standard, then it makes the reading of the work difficult and confusing. So they try to avoid that. In my case, I chose to make a definition of 'digital' which I have learned is different from the standard, or at least widely accepted, definition. So it is no problem for me to acknowledge my bad choice and move to a different word. Now the important thing is that I communicate the concept I am trying to get across. Secondarily, it will be convenient to attach a word, or words, to that concept to form a definition. That way, when my readers encounter that word, they should realize that in this particular context, that is in the material I am presenting, that word signifies what I mean when I use it. It is no different than a statement of the form, "Let L be the length of the beam." In this example nobody quibbles by complaining that someone else used the symbol 'L' for something else somewhere else. So you have criticized my choice of the symbol 'digital' to signify the concept of a mapping from a symbol to a physical entity, and I have given that up and chosen a different symbol, viz. 'symbolism'. Enough explanatory preamble. You are correct that I "have restricted the meaning of "symbolism". This is in the spirit of mathematical usage as I just explained. But you are not quite correct in your statement of my definition. I do not mean that symbolism is "anything that can be perceived as having any sort of mapping has a well-defined symbolic meaning." What I mean, and forgive me for not making this clear, is that symbolism is any mapping from a symbol to a physical entity, where 'symbol' is defined to be some specific arrangement of physical entities such that the mapping from the symbol to the physical entity (not the entity making up the symbol but the one referred to in the symbolism) constitutes meaning in some mind. Of course this now requires the definition of 'meaning' and 'mind'. And, of course, that forces us to face the essence of the entire discussion of mind, consciousness, any putative God, and the questions related to life. So that's good; that's what we should be concerned with. To define 'mind', (keep in mind, I get to make the definitions here because it is my concept that I am trying to communicate to you) I say it is the faculty that is able to experience what you, the reader, have at this very moment while you are reading and parsing this sentence. And of course, I mean the "mental" experience you are having trying to understand what I wrote, not the physical discomfort you may be experiencing because you happen to be sitting on a tack, although I believe that, too, requires a mind to some extent. The last one is the tough one. What is meaning? (It is occurring to me as I compose this, that this may very well be the very essence of the whole subject.) Here's my definition of 'meaning': Meaning is the role a symbol plays in the process of a mind processing the input it receives (usually if not wholly from the physical world) in order to take willful action (OK I should define 'free will', but for the sake of brevity I'll take that as a primitive and let you imagine what it means to you.) to increase the probability of future physical states to match expectations (expectations are, of course, mental states that again I trust you understand what I mean without further definition.) In short, meaning is a component of understanding which allows a thinker to take deliberate action to help cause something predictable to happen. (E.g. the thinker sees a symbol, say a big red octagon emblazoned with the word 'STOP', understands this to mean bring the vehicle to a stop, and takes the deliberate action of applying the brakes. The symbol means "Stop the car!) Next, I have not defined 'mapping', instead taking it to have the customary mathematical definition. I have not done as you said; I have not "limited the definition of "mapping" in the sense of it having to be a priori-defined mapping, that is, you assume it is designed by a mind." If I were to limit the definition of 'mapping', I would restrict it to mappings from symbols to physical entities. Mappings from symbols to symbols, or from non-symbolic physical entities to other physical entities are not ruled out, but they do not play an interesting role in my explanation of the necessary mental role in the establishment of the genetic code. The only interesting mapping in the context of my essay is the mapping between a codon and a specific amino acid group. I hope now I have satisfactorily dealt with your two key issues. With respect, your definition(s) more appropriately seem to fit 'concepts' rather than 'symbolism', but since I'm doing the defining here, I'll stick with my definition above. And my definitions focus the laser beam of attention squarely on the term 'symbol'. The important question, Is a codon a symbol? If you accept my definitions, then, as my argument spells out, mind is necessary in order to establish the symbolism in which the codon is a symbol. If you deny this conclusion, and maintain that a codon is not a symbol (in my sense of the term), then the three nucleotides comprising the codon are no more special than any other three nuceotides and their role and significance in the evolution (I'm talking Schrödinger evolution here, not Darwinian) of the various chemical structures in the cell is no more special than any other chemical action. In the latter case, the genetic code is not a code after all. It is no more a code than the arrangements of the stars in the zodiac really map to bears, twins, etc. That is, the mapping between codons and amino acids, or stars to bears, are simply—what were your words?—"what a "mind" consciously either creates out of whole cloth, or perceives in existing physical systems,". The symbolism is all imaginary and has no impact or effect on any physical system. There is no genetic "code", but simply the purely physical interactions of very complex molecules, because "code" implies a mapping and mappings are purely mental constructs which don't interfere with physical or chemical processes. This red herring does not apply and deserves no more comment. Most true. But the question at hand is whether or not Mother Nature knew what she was doing. Um. I'm not sure what you mean by "first step" so I can't tell whether the foregoing has addressed the problem you see here or not. I'll let you be the judge and let me know in the next round. Yes, your neural nets are impressive; simple initial conditions lead to surprisingly complex results. There is an even more breathtaking example from mathematics: the Mandelbrot Set. I've heard it claimed that the M'set is the most complex structure known in reality (probably claimed by a mathematician). But in any case, the M'set, your neural nets, molecular biology, the question we are exploring here is not how and whether such complex systems evolve once they get started, but the question of what was required in order for them to get started at all. The Mandelbrot set requires that a series of computations be performed according to an exceedingly simple formula. Some mind was necessary to come up with that formula and to implement ways of doing the calculations. Your neural nets run fine unattended once you configure them and apply the power. But some mind was necessary to figure out how to wire up and program the thing in the first place. Is it totally out of the question that molecular biology also required a mind to get it started? I think we should open our minds to the possibility that this provides the most plausible explanation for the origin of life. Well I guess that's strike two against me. I have still failed to get you to see and focus on the correct issue. The *operation* of the system is not the issue. And whether the operation or mechanism is simple or not or resembles a Turing Machine, has no bearing. To paraphrase, none of the telegraph machines nor the electrical impulses modified by them, care what they are doing, even over the entire globe where they were active. Those devices and pulses do not have any "understanding" of the Morse Code. The issue is whether a mind was required to establish Morse Code (which it obviously was) and whether a mind was required to establish the genetic code. You have focused on the operation of the genetic mechanisms and have ignored, or at least not commented on, the way in which the genetic codebook is stored physically, and the possible ways in which the *codebook* was established at the outset. Hmmm...I think I'm beginning to see our difficulty. You seem to think that what I refer to as the "codebook" is a construct in my mind that I am overlaying onto the chemical processes. Not at all. By 'codebook' I mean (I would quote myself if I could easily find what I said earlier but I'll try to reproduce it faithfully) the 60-some-odd sequences within DNA which when replicated into tRNA molecules produce the 60-some-odd species of tRNA molecules. The "codebook" IS those sequences of DNA. The related easy question is how do you explain the varieties of tRNA. Well, the easy and obvious answer is that the first one got replicated 60 or so times, with some minor (by count) changes occurring along the way. The hard question is how those minor changes got effected into the sequences. Keep in mind that in order to get it right, the special codon near the middle of each sequence has to match (i.e. according to the assignment in the genetic code, a purely abstract conceptual thing you will find in textbooks.) the pattern of nucleotides at one end of the sequence which just happens to have the chemical structure necessary to bond with the proper (in the sense of the code assignment) amino acid group. Getting all 60 of those right somehow in some primitive cell without a mind seems impossible to me. I would love to hear you outline some plausible mindless method. I hope I have finally done that. You certainly are quick to haul out that "circular argument" rubber stamp. My statement was just that—an assertion, not an argument. Circularity does not apply. But your point is well taken. Without a mind, the origin is difficult to explain. With a mind, it is easy to explain. But the elephant in the room, in the second case, is that we are now faced with explaining that mind. I think that is a problem science should address. It is the very problem addressed by Greylorn in his book. It would be great if he could get some help from a lot of smart people to figure that puzzle out. But alas, most scientists would rather ignore that possibility and stretch and distort their mindless (that's meant to be descriptive, not pejorative) theories to explain the hard questions which they choose not to ignore. The ones they choose to ignore go unaddressed. Oh I think the observable data would be very easy to fit into that interpretation. We could use the tactic you accuse us of anyway, that if there is a "God" involved, then we can imagine any scenario happening. But you raise interesting questions that I think should be explored. For example, what hard problems could easily be explained by an interventionist mind? How about protein folding as a frequent requirement in which a little help could be used? And the question at issue, How about mental intervention in establishing the genetic code? The problem, as I see it, is the extreme reluctance on the part of scientists to even entertain the notion of some mentality being involved in the origin and processes of life. And when they have the courage to do so, they invariably adopt the (IMHO) ludicrous "almighty" attributes for that mind. How about considering a limited mind who couldn't get it right the first time and had to fumble around with many tries over billions of years to arrive at what we see now. David Hume came to exactly this conclusion as a possibility, but unfortunately neither he nor any of his readers took it seriously. It was meant to dismiss the notion altogether. It reminds me of Einstein covering up the implication of an expanding universe with his patched-on cosmological constant, which he later regretted. This notion, of a limited and bumbling designer, could easily be reconciled with the fossil record to identify the pattern of trial and error, successes and failures. This advice and hope is directed to the various physical scientists. Equally important, again IMHO, there should be a scientific effort to study the mind qua mind. This, of course, is the job of psychologists, who as yet, IMHO, have yet to discover anything whatsoever that is important in the subject of mentality. But that's another topic for another day. I hope I have given you at least a glimpse of my reasoning on this issue. Most true. I will be gone for a few days, so forgive my delay in responding until I get back. Also please forgive the typos here; I am in sort of a rush to leave. Thanks again, Paul