What makes life vital (Introduction)

by David Turell , Sunday, March 01, 2015, 19:36 (3554 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: An essay on the total interconnectedness of living tissues and organisms by Stephen L. Talbott:
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> http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-unbearable-wholeness-of-beings
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> QUOTE: "...we find in every organism a meaningful coordination of its activities, whereby it becomes a functioning and self-sustaining unity engaged in a flexible response to the infinitely varying stimuli of its environment.” 
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> DAVID: In summary his point is that we are not machines in any true sense of the word. After reading his essay, tell me if you still think this can develop from inorganic material by chance. I've read and quoted from all four essays. Try them out.
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> dhw: You have indeed quoted them, and I have pointed out that over and over again he contradicts your claim that organisms are automatons.-No he does not. I know the quotes to intelligence you love referring to are in the essays I present. You act as if I don't know them. I keep repeating the point that life is a very complex interaction of biochemical reactions resulting in the emergence of the phenomenon we call life. We live in the inside of that phenomenon. As he points out a dead body and a live body are exactly the same except in the dead body life is absent. To repeat for the nth time: life works on implanted information and he presents a diagram of some of the enormous complex ongoing interactions to create the phenomenon of life.-> dhw> "Alternatively, as another research group has put it, we see a “collaborative” process that can be “pictured as a table around which decision-makers debate a question and respond collectively to information put to them.” Except that he goes on to say there are countless such tables.-Exactly true, and if a tiny aspect of that collaboration is at fault we see a genetic disease such as 'sickle cell' with poorly made hemoglobin, made to survive in Africa because the malaria parasite can't use it, and allows these poor folks to live and reproduce, fixing a trait we do not need. -Further, there are two levels of information to be concerned with: the received and the on-board guidance info. Both exist and both require and control the cooperation of all the various interactions for life to exist. Some of the received info is from the exterior, but most of it is info between the different cooperating organs that keep us alive. Organs that run on in internal supplied instructional information. -> dhw:After reading his essay, which argues that organisms are NOT machines, please tell me if you still think cells / cell communities are automatons?-As Talbott points out, we do not have the descriptive terms in our language to really define a living being. Of course we are not machines but we are machine-like, with cogs and pulleys and whatever to function properly. But our bodies are at a much higher level with the emergence of life. That is his real point. The terms you like to seize on are analogies, because the concept of how life works biochemically is so hard to describe. How do we know how complex cellular function is? The research biochemists carefully delineate each single step of these complex molecular interactions, controlled by information in the genome. There must be underlying carefully planned controls. Life cannot be a free for all disco dance.