Theoretical origin of life; requires intellect (Introduction)

by David Turell , Saturday, December 03, 2016, 20:16 (2912 days ago) @ David Turell

A Russian scientist/priest presents his viewpoint. This is an excerpt from a very long essay:

http://www.uncommondescent.com/informatics/ud-guest-post-dr-eugen-s-on-the-second-law-o...

"To create life, from the point of view of systems theory and information theory, it was necessary to organize the complex {code+protocol+translator}, – the whole of it and at once, – simply because code without its complementary translator is useless rubbish and, likewise, a translator without code a meaningless pile of junk. Furthermore, a protocol is a set of rules i.e. a non-physical thing, a logical correspondence of material entities that have no physical or chemical attraction or bias of any sort to one another. How could that arise by purely physicalistic means?! Total nonsense!

"No physical fluctuation of macrostate – of entropy, density, pressure, temperature – can achieve it. The first ever living organism already was not reducible to its constituents. A gradual path for its own assembly starting at a spontaneous fluctuation of state is non-existent if this world. It is a myth. Nature only permits the creation of information processing systems being itself indifferent to information processing; indifferent in the same sense as a spherical mass is at equilibrium on a horizontal plane without friction.

"If we take a look at how life is organized, we shall see that its organization is purposefully directed to counteract entropic increases. Death is the unavoidable end of this wrestling as far as an individual living organism is concerned. Before dying though an organism passes on life to the next generation which is organized in the same way. «The fight against the second law» is realized as replication. Although every new organism and even the replication mechanism itself are subject to degradation over time (the latter at a much slower rate than the former), the heart of life, so to speak, is in replication!

***

"Nothing of the sort can be observed in inanimate nature as a complex. Various individual elements of this complex are observed, such is crystal growth/replication for instance. However, for a crystal to grow information translation and codes are not necessary. Crystals grow mechanically, as matrix bulk-copying of layers upon layers of lattice, in line with the minimum total potential energy principle. In contrast, the genetic code cannot be explained solely by this principle since the essence of translation is in the processing of tokens that only evoke physical effects without determining what these effects should be! Tokens impose boundary conditions on the system dynamics.

"As a matter of fact, biosemiotics as a discipline that describes sign processing in biological systems, views a token, not a gene, as a unit of life. According to biosemiotics (cf. here and here), life is physics coupled with specific symbolic boundary conditions, which includes organized behaviour for working with symbolic memory.This is where our materialist interlocutors are in error or decidedly playing word games.

"Some of them, who are educated enough to appreciate the predicament for their worldview, find nothing better than questioning the objectivity of information as a scientifically detectable phenomenon. That is understandable: if you think of this, they have no other option. Playing the fool is a lot more comfortable than having to acknowledge the obvious i.e. that life has intelligent origin!

"So, non-living matter is missing the important ingredient that is key for the organization of life: it is absolutely void of any information translation. That must be the emphasis in our discussions with naturalists. Unfortunately, from the point of view of mere thermodynamics, life is indistinguishable from non-life: in both there are physical interactions of particles; in both non-living and living systems energy is spent and entropy tends to maximum. After all, both life and non-life use the same chemical elements from the same periodical system."

Comment: This is his conclusion after a long article discussing entropy and how life answers that process. Look at his figures for more explanation.