Origin of life and consciousness. The two mysteries that, in spite of all progress made in all sciences, have no explanation in sight.
It's easy to put a dogma on them, just as it's as easy to dismiss supernatural explanations just because they're supernatural (although metaphysically plausible).
But it strikes me just how hard the scientific community is trying to find a very particular kind of explanation in order to dismiss others: mind is the brain, life is just self-replicating molecules.
I think you'd have a hard time finding a scientist in the field that doesn't think that the mind is the result of the brain's action, but in origin of life research, "self-replicating molecules" is not the only game in town.
The two main approaches are "replicator-first" and "metabolism-first", though the replicators seem to do better in the popular press. I did my doctoral work in this field, and I was in the metabolism camp along with many of the major scientists working on the problem.
In a nutshell, "metabolism-first" means that a network of many interacting molecules were changing their local environment, eventually creating various feedback cycles that amplified the effect. Meaningful replication (especially of the RNA/DNA "informational polymer" variety) likely came significantly later, and almost certainly after the metabolic system had already achieved a basic state of homeostasis.
It was likely an evolutionary advancement of the "metabolic system" to use molecules like RNA (if not RNA itself, initially) to establish a more robust homeostasis by encoding information about the system in a more stable form.
I don't think any scientist questions that the brain is integral to the experience of consciousness, but there are quite a few cogent scientists that challenge the mainstream proposition that consciousness is merely an epiphenomenon of the brain. It does seem that mainstream scientists feel married to a mechanistic/material/reductionist world view.
Supernatural "explanations" don't actually explain anything, they don't make any testable predictions. They aren't very useful or interesting. They're "not even wrong".
Useful, interesting are very subjective terms. Just like when people take pride in the fact 'science' put a thing on Mars while 'religion' can't do such a thing.
Supernatural explanations can be and are (sometimes) wrong. If someone says that this or that supernatural phenomenon took place, and it didn't, then their statement is false.
If I tell you that a certain rock was created on the spot by a supernatural being, and that is exactly what happened, than my statement is an explanation of what happened.
Testable predictions are an addagio that is specific to natural sciences. Asking to every single explanation for any kind of phenomena out there to have testable predictions is a sign of dogmatism and ideological bigotry.
>Supernatural explanations can be and are (sometimes) wrong.
Of course. But what reasons are there for believing they are sometimes right?
>If I tell you that a certain rock was created on the spot
by a supernatural being, and that is exactly what happened, than my statement is an explanation of what happened.
If. I've essentially got the same question as above here: what reasons are there for believing that this does actually happen?
>Testable predictions are an addagio that is specific to natural sciences. Asking to every single explanation for any kind of phenomena out there to have testable predictions is a sign of dogmatism and ideological bigotry.
I actually agree that it's not a matter of what we can (at least at the moment) test. It's too strong a requirement. But that doesn't get you off the hook. It doesn't therefore mean that anything that can't be tested can just be asserted as true.
If something is to be believed, there has to be some reasons that suggest that it is the case. These can be good reasons, or they can be poor reasons. They can be quite flawed. (I think they ultimately should be grounded in evidence, but that's another matter).
So if someone wants to say we should believe in something supernatural, they still have to justify their claim, and this justification can still be evaluated.
"no explanation in sight"? - we don't know how life originated , but it's hardly some great mystery as to the kind of way might have happened. There's a number of theories about the kinds of ways it could have happened.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis
> just as it's as easy to dismiss supernatural explanations just because they're supernatural (although metaphysically plausible)
Why are you suggesting that being "metaphysically plausible" means they shouldn't be dismissed?
> just how hard the scientific community is trying to find a very particular kind of explanation in order to dismiss others
I'm going to call you out on that and say that it is ridiculous to suggest that the scientific community is working on certain kinds of explanations in order to dismiss others.
I don't know anything about the brain and consciousness that requires mind not to be the brain. If you damage the face recognition module, you damage the mind's ability to recognize the fact.
The issue is not whether the brain is necessary for consciousness, but whether it is sufficient. Like you said, brain damage affects our conscious experience. However, consciousness includes a purely subjective element that, so far, has no explanation in a reductionist sense. That is, why do we experience redness? Why is there an experienced inner life?
Science is a great tool for explaining how the brain works, in the sense of "why did I do that?" or "how are signals from the optical nerve processed?". However, because the experience of consciousness is so subjective, I doubt that science will be able to explain it. After all, science is designed to work on objective reality.
> ...because the experience of consciousness is so subjective, I doubt that science will be able to explain it. After all, science is designed to work on objective reality
The experience is subjective. But what are the actual details that produce that experience? We just don't know. But if it has an explanation there is no reason to presume that that explanation must have the same sorts of properties as what is being explained.
An analogy: before we understood what is actually going on with fire (a kind of molecular reaction), it could seem as if it was a separate category of stuff - what else was there that was like fire? But it would have been wrong to assume that therefore "fireness" was some fundamental, intrinsic property of fire.
As to subjective conscious experience, we don't know what it is, and I don't think there's any reason to think that the explanation will itself be 'subjective', and that it can't be something objective (even if it's some different kind of objective detail, different from anything else we currently understand).
This is very interesting indeed. It goes a long way towards displaying a view of organisms as an ecosystem composed of a very large and diversified family of symbiots (cells), themselves composed of synergistic molecules, with all the chemical reactions happening in a joyfully probabilistic & dynamic equilibrium.
It's easy to put a dogma on them, just as it's as easy to dismiss supernatural explanations just because they're supernatural (although metaphysically plausible).
But it strikes me just how hard the scientific community is trying to find a very particular kind of explanation in order to dismiss others: mind is the brain, life is just self-replicating molecules.