Silent Assumption in the Chemical Scenario

Let’s imagine for a moment that chemicals can come together in a way so complex that they ‘come to life.’  We should remember, of course, that this is not a scientific but a magical claim.   The silent assumption woven into our psyches is that once a material system is capable of LIFE, it will automatically behave in a way that satisfies specific goals.  That it do things like reproduce itself or defend the 'living' process within its cellular boundary, or to seek out material resources it needs for energy, etc.   

This is a profound assumption.  Each of these requires an incredible degree of intelligent behavior; behavior like planning and foresight.  Unfortunately, there is absolutely no reason any of these behaviors should occur.  There is no model that explains ‘complex chemical arrangement’ becoming ‘logical system’. 

To reiterate, that any chemical system (however ‘complex’) should do these things is an inherently non-scientific assumption, as no scientific or theoretical principle can ever bridge material substance and logical behavior (to explain the latter in terms of the former).

On the one hand, intelligence is a profound thing, yet behind all intelligent systems goals must be established; -- goals are ideal states, states that are preferred over all others.  ONLY if these imperatives are established, can living things survive and evolve.  Which demands the question:

Why do we mistakenly suppose that the physical structure of the cell (as an arrangement of chemicals) is somehow synonymous with the precise behavior required for 'it' to 'survive'? 

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Supposing our chemical soup can create language (it cannot) and a cell that reads language (it cannot), and granting that the instructions to build new machines are encoded in the language (a process which has never been witnessed to occur accidentally or without a mind), why should it be the case that this thing (referring to the ‘first cell’ supposedly the common ancestor to all others) 'know' what to do?   

Having no history, or concept of space and time, or notion like ‘I’ vs the world, how does this cell interpret the chaos around it well enough to stay ‘alive’?  If ‘it’ doesn’t know its alive, WHY would it care to stay alive?  “Well, computers don’t have a ‘concept’ of space and time, and they do things all the time” you might say.  And this is the point – computers literally have programs, and literally have programmers.  A cell cannot have a “metaphorical” program but actually exhibit behavior that requires a real program.  Walker and Davies describe in similar fashion this same limitation to the conceptually unviable framework origin-of-life researchers have been working in for the past century:

“Explaining the chemical substrate of life and claiming it as a solution to life’s origin is like pointing to silicon and copper as an explanation for the goings-on inside a computer. “

The paradox of the materialist model can best be thought of this way:  It is one thing to design a car, it’s another entirely to program a car to drive itself – and another thing entirely still to teach the car to learn! 

To extend the example, suppose you programmed a car to find gas stations when needed, if gas stations disappeared, would the car find “new solutions” to this problem, as so-called ‘nature’ seems to do time and time again?  The entire narrative of 20^th century biology (storytelling where it pertains to life’s origins) basically assumes that once the cell (the car in our analogy) is created, through a series of ‘chance’ events (apparently), the problem is solved.  Yet behavior --logical intelligence-- requires a completely separate set of challenges to be accounted for!

What is worse, is that the series of ‘accidents’ required for intelligence (though in the case of life it is not clear what these ‘accidents’ might be) are undoubtedly independent of those accidents that created the physical structures within the cell.  DNA, Ribosomes, cytoskeletal local-motion, self-replication and resource acquisition each require a separate “inexplicable” and “improbable” miracle.

…the puzzle lies with something fundamentally different, a problem of causal organization having to do with the separation of informational and mechanical aspects into parallel causal narratives. The real challenge of life’s origin is thus to explain how instructional information control systems emerge naturally and spontaneously from mere molecular dynamics. It is this issue which we explore in the remainder of this paper.

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The question regarding the origins of logical behavior has traditionally been ignored. 

spon·ta·ne·ous (sp n-t n - s). adj. 1. Happening or arising without apparent external cause; self-generated

These questions are waived away by saying: things just ‘start to behave’ and then ‘evolve’… but what does the term ‘behavior’ even mean if not referring to the strict cause-and-effect world of universal law?  Behavior is used in a way that implies logos but then disingenuous pseudo-scientists insist its physics.  This fallacy, by the way, is called equivocation – using a single term in multiple ways as is convenient to defend one’s argument.

The deception is that the behavior of matter we call physics, is purportedly sufficient to explain the behavior of logical things – the former, physics is completely distinct from logos.  Nested in the term ‘behavior’ is a type of action above or beyond strict physical behavior.  It is behavior according to a logos or logical system, to norms, ideals and preferred values -- not strictly according to physical laws. 

In a world of darkness lacking history and thus lacking instinct, we might reasonably expect this new 'thing' to swim in circles forever, or simply sit still and do nothing; or consume the 'wrong' materials.  Yet, no.  This ‘first cell’ labors and struggles to acquire what she needs, to produce more of her kind, so that her children might eventually cooperate and become greater than the sum of their parts.

In time they would create entire colonies, all built from the plans of a single cell.  Every individual unit in this new ‘multi-cellular’ organism would be exact copies of the original, but had now the ability to assume a personal identity.  An identity commensurate with their purpose and duty to the community.  We call this cell-differentiation, as if by naming it, it ceases to be miraculous.  Miraculous in the literal sense, as no law can explain it.

And though we cannot engineer a device to achieve any of these activities – we imagine that ‘nature’ found a way.  Though nature didn’t ‘try’ to find away, and in fact, ‘nature’ refers to nothing at all.