Can the Monist View Account for "What Is Life?"

In this article we would like to address the soundness and adequacy of the monist view of reality which conceives of “all that there is” as ultimately reducible to the concept of “matter in its motions.” This view holds that there is no essential difference between living and non-living systems in nature since both ultimately are expressions of the workings of the physical laws and only the physical laws. This insight or expectation leads one to presume that the laws of physics and chemistry are entirely sufficient to explain how matter came one day to spontaneously generate Life and thus all evolving living systems. This hypothesis is called abiogenesis and, try as hard as many first-rate researchers have done thus far, the fact is it has never yet been scientifically demonstrated.

Darwin studiously avoided abiogenesis in his major works — hence the insistence on the forum that the “theory of evolution” does not include abiogenesis. Perhaps his avoidance of the issue was for political reasons, we don’t know. At any rate, Darwin was known for his speculations about a “warm little pond” though evidently he didn’t want it to be a part of his theory. http://www.evowiki.org/index.php/Abiogenesis.

And yet one readily gets the impression on following the forum debate that many, if not most, subscribers to Darwin’s theory suppose that abiogenesis did, in fact, occur in some far distant past. On this view, biological evolution takes its origin from an unvalidated event that is presumed to be wholly material in character. This materialist aspect is fully consonant with the Darwinian view; abiogenesis rounds out the cosmological view to include a “beginning,” the problem that Darwin sought to avoid.

Implicit in the monist theory is the expectation that the universe is causally closed. All causes are material causes, and what we see all around us is the present cumulative effect of a virtually infinite succession of random material events that have taken place from a virtually infinite past until now. Such causes arise only within the 3+1 dimensional “block” of space-time as we humans normally experience/conceive it.

Yet as Elitzur (1993) points out, “the most essential attribute of randomness is the absence of connection between the states of the system’s components.” Organization, by definition, means that the system’s parts are highly correlated. The converse of “organization” is “reducibility” or “separability.” Therefore, organization means non-separability, connectivity. A. Grandpierre points out that “biological organization is different from physical ordering that is accompanied by a decrease of entropy. While physical ordering (misleadingly called ‘self-organization,’ but its actual meaning is self-ordering) plays an important role in storing information, the dynamical process of government through information is a process with a quite different nature.”

And yet the monist view holds that “all that there is” is fundamentally reducible to material random events or accidents being fortuitously tamed or shaped by physical laws. Which is what you would expect if you think that only material, physical, tangible entities are real. And thus information processing in living systems is a subject that can never come up in the first place; for fundamentally it is an immaterial, intangible process.

And yet here’s the interesting situation that develops from the physicalist (i.e., monist) concept: The physical laws themselves are immaterial, non-physical, intangible entities. It is here that the monist view breaks down as a valid interpretation of nature on its own terms. You can’t at the same time say that physical matter is all that there is and then turn around and invoke an immaterial principle that conditions or determines material behavior without engaging in self-contradiction.

And what can we say about the physical laws themselves — the great laws of motion and thermodynamics? Assuming that they “tame matter” or cause it to behave in certain ways, and assuming that matter is more or less “dumb and blind” (and quite possibly “lazy!”), then the physical laws must possess an informative content. And there’s another very interesting thing about the physical laws: They are in the main all laws of conservation. It has been observed that the amount of information required for conservation of a system seems not to be high, at least in comparison with the amount of information needed for a system to organize itself, modify its behavior, develop, evolve. For matter, left to its own devices (e.g., blind, dumb, and lazy devices), will follow the principle of “least action.” To put this into perspective, Paul Davies (The Fifth Miracle, 1998) writes:

“The laws of physics … are algorithmically very simple; they contain relatively little information. Consequently they cannot on their own be responsible for creating informational macromolecules … life cannot be ‘written into’ the laws of physics…. Life works its magic not by bowing to the directionality of chemistry, but by circumventing what is chemically and thermodynamically ‘natural.’ Of course, organisms must comply with the laws of physics and chemistry, but these laws are only incidental to biology.”

For the above reasons, the present writers remain skeptical about claims issuing from the monist position with regard to the fundamental origin and nature of life in the Universe. There is a need to account for, not only the fact that life cannot be exhaustively explained in terms of what is “chemically and thermodynamically ‘natural’”; but even more importantly, that life seems to work to counter the outcomes predicted by the physical laws.

Of particular interest is the possible relation of entropy and information in living systems. By information we mean the successful communication of a message (or “informative text”) such as to cause a “reduction of uncertainty in the receiver,” as formulated in terms of Shannon information theory. Note that “reduction of uncertainty in the receiver” issues as an actual event by virtue of a “decision” made and thus is analogous to state vector collapse in quantum microsystems, and to realized intended outcomes of sentient beings in “real-world” macrosystems. In all three cases, it appears that the probability amplitude is collapsed into just one “choice,” and all other possibilities vanish into a netherworld of unrealized (at that moment at least) potentialities. In all three cases, we seem to be looking at instances of very frank “quantizations” of “the continuum.”

Thus the thought occurs to one: Perhaps it is the ubiquitous presence of “observers” making “informed” choices which constitutes the irreversible “arrow of time” of the second law of thermodynamics. For “observations” lead to events (decisions) which, in the 3+1D block, constitute a successive temporal sequence of newly produced causes or, more to the point, a history (which can be thought of as evolution in retrospect). And history — like memory — is an irreversible process.

Alternatively, in the Feynman/Everett multi-world models, history may be a sum of histories (the cat is both alive and dead). In the second case the apparent thermodynamic entropy on our particular worldline as observer (the phenomenon which suggests an arrow of time) — is only one selection — though for our worldline that path or arrow of time would likewise seem irreversible. Whether or not it is actually irreversible and whether the arrow of time itself points in one direction only depends on whether there is another temporal dimension (f-Theory, Vafa). We need to mention that we recognize the significance of other multi-world and extra temporal dimension models as competing cosmological views. A fuller treatment of this subject is beyond the scope of the present article.

Now it is controversial that thermodynamics can have anything at all to do with the propagation and transmission of information. Indeed, it is reasonable to draw the negative conclusion, provided that one’s thermodynamical model is the one espoused by Boltzmann, whose hypothesis was that the second law is a law of disorder, of chaos. That hypothesis alone would appear to make thermodynamics a problematical construct for systems that are complex and self-organizing, such as living systems seem to be. And yet living systems are ineluctibly microstates within the global macrostate so well described by the second law of thermodynamics. This problem has been well noted.

Yockey, for instance (in Information Theory and Molecular Biology, 1992), presented a mathematical proof that Shannon entropy and thermodynamic entropy are functions of probability spaces that are not isomorphic. From this mathematical fact, he draws the conclusion that these two entropies have “nothing whatever to do” with each other:

“The function for entropy in both classical statistical mechanics and the von Neumann entropy of quantum statistical mechanics has the dimensions of the Boltzmann constant k and has to do with energy and momentum, not information.”

But what if the sine qua non hallmark or signature of living organisms is that they work by converting thermodynamic entropy into Shannon entropy? This would mean that although the two entropies belong to non-isomorphic probability spaces, living organisms preeminently possess a mechanism to bring the two probability spaces into direct relations. Indeed, that may be the entire point about what it is that constitutes the difference between a living and non-living system.

This is the problem that Hungarian astrophysicist A. Grandpierre tackles straight on in a forthcoming work. It is perhaps surprising that an astrophysicist would veer into biology. It turns out that his researches into the nature of the Sun suggested that astral bodies are self-organizing systems that actively work against the setting up of thermodynamic equilibrium that would otherwise obtain given initial and boundary conditions. In other words, the Sun is not a “hot ball of gas.” And so the resemblance of the Sun’s observed behavior to anything that we normally perceive as “biological behavior” struck him as an interesting problem.

As for the criteria of “biological behavior” to be applied, Grandpierre primarily draws on Ervin Bauer, a Hungarian theoretical biologist and physicist active during the first part of the 20th century, largely under Soviet auspices. Bauer is little known today. (His work, Theoretical Biology [1935], was published only in German and Russian and, we gather, is out of print anyway.) But we think he will make a come-back. For as far as we know, it was Ervin Bauer who first drew thermodynamics into explicit connection with biological theory, and Grandpierre highly values his insights:

“Living organisms do not tend towards the physical equilibrium related to their initial and boundary conditions, but [at all times] act in order to preserve their distances from the deathly physical equilibrium” predicted by the second law.

This says that, unlike physical systems, living systems move in just the opposite direction from that predicted by the second law: that is, living systems, for as long as possible, are devoted to evading or forestalling the eventual total loss of potential energies for the task of productive work, and thus ultimately “heat death.” But if living systems can counter the second law, then one must ask, how do they do that?

Grandpierre notes that “entropy is a somewhat subtle concept just because it connects two fundamentally different realms, of which only one is usually termed as ‘reality.’ Entropy connects the realms of possibilities with the world of manifested phenomena. If one would guess that possibilities do not exist since they do not belong to the phenomenal world, this would be conceptually confusing at the proper understanding of physical world. The central role of entropy is one of the most fundamental laws of Nature; the second law of thermodynamics tells that possibilities do belong to reality — and determine the direction of development of physical systems.”

“[First we must] quantify some biologically fundamental aspects of entropy, information, order, and biological organization. Thermodynamic entropy, S and the entropic distance of the human body from its physical equilibrium at constant internal energy [must be] determined quantitatively, together with the number of microstates related to physical, chemical, and biological macrostates.

“We distinguish between physically and biologically possible states. In physical objects internal energy is redistributed by dissipative processes. In living organisms the Gibbs free energy, G is also redistributed, but not only in the individual degrees of freedom, but also by means of the consecutively coupling action of biological organization, which works on the whole set of all possible collective degrees of freedom.”

From the “here determined quantities [that] shed light on the source of biological information….our calculations show that the relatively high value of S [entropy] enhances the ability of living matter to represent information.”

And thus, by “determining the average information flow of a cell in the human body, and determining the enthalpy of a DNA molecule, we can draw quantitative consequences with regard to the static and dynamic information content of DNA. We estimated that the information necessary to govern the >105 chemical reactions sec^–1 cell^–1 in the 6*10¹³ human cells requires >10¹⁹ bits sec^–1 that cannot be supplied from the static sequential information content of DNA ~10⁹ bits for more than 10^–10 sec. Physical self-ordering and biological self-organization represent opposite yet complementary tendencies that together cooperate to serve optimal balance. All these results together show that the source of biological information is ultimately to be found in the Bauer principle, in the same manner as the source of physical information is to be found in the [least-]action principle of physics.”

Elsewhere Grandpierre refers to the Bauer principle as the “life principle.” This has been alternatively termed as the fecundity principle (Swenson), or “the will to live.” It is customary to regard DNA as the information source that drives living systems. But having estimated the gigantic information flow present in the human body, and comparing that with the static information content of DNA, Grandpierre realized that there is something like a 20-orders of magnitude deficit in DNA information as compared with this number. We point out that DNA is the same in every cell of the body; and yet different cells are undergoing all kinds of different reactions, are involving themselves in collective modes (formation of macromolecules, organs, etc.) constantly. Obviously, the relatively low information content of DNA cannot explain the huge variety of functions that are taking place in the human body at every instant of time. Another interesting fact is that an organism’s DNA is exactly the same in a living cell as it is in a dead one. Thus if anything, it appears that DNA primarily works at the level of “physically-possible systems” (which are those that are still operational after death occurs), and so does not appear to be the only or even the main factor in biological self-organization, self-maintenance, etc. In order to be effective in the governance of “biologically-possible systems,” DNA itself must have access to a dynamic information source in order to compensate for the deficit of its static information in terms of driving biological behaviors.

So, where does this dynamic information come from? We are usually criticized for introducing a “pink unicorn” at this stage of the argument, for we propose that biological information is carried by a universal field. And yet the existence of fields is uncontroversial in science. We know that there are particle fields, force fields (e.g., EM, gravitation fields), and the reality of vacuum field is also uncontroversial. The main point about a field is its universal extent. Being universal, it is not an “ordinary” object of 3+1D spacetime. Rather, fields constitute matrices in which events happen, ultimately unifying all world processes into one integrated whole.

Fields apply universally to all points in space/time — every where and every when — thus they are neither time-restricted nor spatial coordinate restricted.

Grandpierre argues that, in addition to the other fields identified by science, there is also a “biofield” or an organic zero-point vacuum field that is the carrier of biological information. An analogy might help to explicate the theory. The Internet is a “universal” information field that can be accessed by anyone who has the proper equipment. There are often cases when communications are sent to us over the Internet. DNA stands for the particular “address” at which we can be successfully contacted; DNA is “smart enough” to be a router for incoming information addressed specifically to a particular receiver. And its presence as a router is necessary; otherwise, information being addressed to us would have no efficient way to reach us and, thus, to do us any good.

One might speculate that the physical laws, being also universal in extent and application, may similarly be field-carried phenomena in this sense.

In any case, when we speak of a “netherworld of yet-unrealized possibilities” occasioned by a re-imagined second law, are we not speaking of potentially real things that have to reside somewhere, because they represent states of potentiality that may become actualized? If this “netherworld” is of universal extent, then it would need a field to carry it.

In the space of a short article, we can only briefly touch on the arguments advanced by Dr. Grandpierre and his associates. If you have an interest in looking at his research, the Journal of Theoretical Biology may soon publish an article of his (working title: “Thermodynamic Entropy and Biological Information”) which richly details the merest sketch of certain key points given above, and a wealth of others besides.

But [Kant] was a philosopher who wanted to construct a rational basis for morality. One can hardly, as a reasoning being, object to that. Your point apparently is that morality must be irrational. Owch!

Yee-hah!!! The battle is (finally) joined! :^)

To put morality on a “rational basis” would be to make man, not God, the validating source of morality. And given that different men will have different rational concepts, there is no one “tie that binds” in the moral universe. What there is, is an endless series of competing claims about the value (or lack thereof) of moral responsibility and what it consists of.

And Kant himself tips us off — in the “by your will” language of the Categorical Imperative — that we might expect that “by will” is the manner in which such questions will be settled. Either by means of the “popular will” of the ballot box, or the “general will” of totalist systems as articulated by the dictator. We have Communist China, Islamofascism, the Third Reich, and today’s variegated genocidal tyrannies in the Third World, notably in the Middle East and Africa, Southeast Asia, et al., as evidence of what “morality” turns out to be “when man gets to decide what morality is.”

Not to mention more “entrepreneurial” approaches to the problem of morality by individual rational (or irrational when you come right down to it) thinkers in terms of making moral law a “sui generis proposition.” (E.g., “if it feels good, do it.”)

Kant probably never explicitly foresaw this development. But the logic of his Imperative has been played out in history repeatedly, and continues to curse and scourge the human race to this day (as it always has done in human history, come to think of it).

[Kant] posited the necessity of God and the immortality of the soul as necessary for humans to reach the highest pinnacle of virtue, which was unobtainable in a finite lifespan. But it does appear that much of the invocation of God in his works was partly to keep himself out of further trouble with the authorities; and partly because he wasn't able to bring himself to abandon his Christianity.

There is truth in what you say here, RWP; but it is a truth pertaining to surface appearance, not to the depth of the problem. Kant here was merely recapitulating ancient doctrines of Christianity; but it seems for him, the true spirit of that doctrine had already been largely eclipsed by the “pulls” of the age in which he lived, which valued Reason above all things, even above the maker and sustainer of all Being, to Whom (it seems to me) we humans owe infinite gratitude.

An orthodox Christian might say that Kant had constructed an “idol” that displaced God as his first love. Just to think that God might be imagined as reducible to human categories of thought is to put such categories into First Place in terms of one’s love and fealty.

The fact is there is no way in which God can be conceived in terms of purely human categories and still be God. God is not to be defined by us. Such categorization produces only the reflection of the man who is making it.

Saint Anselm of Canterbury succinctly states the problem: “O Lord, you are not only that than which a greater cannot be conceived, but you are also greater than what can be conceived.” [My itals]

And so Anselm prays: “Speak to my desirous soul what you are, other than what it has seen, that it may clearly see what it desires.” [And believe it or not, but the Lord does “speak” to “desirous souls.”]

Now here’s the “ghost in the machine” rearing its ugly head in the imaginations of our contemporary “intellectual elites.” The soul, our natural extension into the realm of the Spirit, is either outright denied as absurd, or locked up in the attack like a crazed, senile, ancient maiden aunt…who is an embarrassment to us.

And yet I believe that every human person who is born into this world comes equipped with a “spiritual center” that we call the soul. It is present as the fundamental, paradigmatic quality of our most intimate being and, as such, is something that we need to come to terms with.

I think all people are at least dimly aware of this “presence” in themselves. What people do with this awareness largely determines what people become. There are many strategies for dealing with the soul. We can deny its existence outright — as e.g., Dawkins, Pinker, Lewontin, and a legion of other of our “brightest lights” do. We can admit we have one, but stipulate that it has nothing to do with God. Or we could simply recognize it for the divine gift that it is, and give thanks and praise to its Grantor.

But if we do admit that we have a soul, and yet deny God, then we are “free” to fill up this “spiritual space” at the center of our very being with whatever we want to fill it with.

I do not now recall whether it was Chesterton or Lewis who articulated this insight, which I can only paraphrase from memory right now: When a man ceases to believe in God, that does not mean that he has ceased to believe in anything. It means that he can believe in anything. We can "stuff" the soul to the gills with whatever "junk food" we want to feed it on, so to speak.

But unfortunately, the problem is not that simple, nor is that particular "option" harmless, either to ourselves, or to our wider extensions in the worlds of nature and society.

In conclusion, I don’t think morality is “irrational” at all. It is the creation of the same Creator who ensouled us and endued us with reason in the first place. And for us rational humans to recognize, with St. Anselm, that there are questions that go so beyond our rational capabilities as to be unanswerable in this life, seems not to be “irrational” at all.

Well, FWIW, Professor! Thank you so much for writing.

Random action can cause elements to combine, it can cause elements to be re-shaped, but these random combinations are always competing against their own deconstruction. Relying on random action alone, we can never advance more than a very few steps away from the “random” state before entropy carries us slipping right back down the hill. Waiting on random processes to build me a diesel engine isn’t even mathematically possible given all the time in the universe, because each step toward “engineness” will be worn away and broken down by the very same forces that we are depending on to create it.

I particularly admired this:

Of course, the intelligence or information in any living creature is de-centralized, each cell has its own core which carries either its own store of logic and memory, or the address of that store, but for these individual cells to assemble themselves into the creature we recognize, a cat for example, there must exist a blueprint for a cat somewhere, which this DNA code accesses by some means. This blueprint might be on-board somewhere, embedded in the DNA, or accessed by means of the DNA calling up subroutines elsewhere, or there might be a platonic catness-field that its ISP accesses by some means. How it happens is beyond my faculties, but the blueprint must exist. If there aren’t enough bits in a DNA string, then the information must be stored elsewhere.

Oh marron, I think we are on the same wavelength regarding these problems. So perhaps you won't be surprised to learn that I think your essay is simply sublime. You express so beautifully, so concisely, so cogently, so elegantly what I have been struggling to articulate for quite some time now. I am happy and grateful to be in your debt, dear man.

Methinks you may be some kind of "second coming" of Heraclitus (4th century B.C.) who had a profound intuition that the ultimate nature of Life in general, and living systems in particular, refers to that which does not change within the medium of constant change. That is to say, in life there is always that which persists (i.e., remains the same) connected to a "broken symmetry" (i.e., that which changes). It was the ancient Greeks who first noticed this, and it seems to me that Christianity affirms the observation.

Thank you oh so very much for this beautiful article, dear marron!

I am taken aback at the proposition that there are different 'rational concepts'. Surely not. Logic is logic; it is not subjective. If A entails B, and B entails C, then A entails C. I don't care if you're American or Bantu.

And Kant himself tips us off — in the “by your will” language of the Categorical Imperative — that we might expect that “by will” is the manner in which such questions will be settled.

I can settle this immediately. What you posted was a misquotation.

This is Abbott's translation of the Critique of Practical Reason. Abbott's translation is, I believe, authoritative.

Hit find with the argument 'FUNDAMENTAL LAW OF THE PURE PRACTICAL REASON' and you will get

Act so that the maxim of thy will can always at the same time hold good as a principle of universal legislation.

(My German is just OK, but this seems to be an accurate translation of Kant's Handle so, daß die Maxime deines Willens jederzeit zugleich als Prinzip einer allgemeinen Gesetzgebung gelten könne)

All this really means is that you should only act as if the rule according to which you act could be taken as a universal principle.

Now I'll be first to find you 10 examples of how this can be an impractical and too-inflexible moral stricture; but IMO for a one-sentence moral compass, it surpasses anything else anyone has come up with. And it's not too far from your Mom's favorite 'What would happen if everyone did that?'.

Skipping over a lot of good stuff, let me deal with your summary

The proposition that there exists a category of experience or entities invulnerable to, or beyond reason is almost by definition unprovable, and I think it contradicts everyday experience. Moreover, while (in direct contradiction to your first paragraph) reason is common to us all, revelation, or whatever you call your mode of interacting with the ineffable, is quite subjective. Despite the efforts of Huxley and James and the like to unite Meister Eckert with the Sufis and Gautama Buddha and Timothy Leary and getting drunk down in Harvard Yard, in general people disagree, and often come to blows, about the authenticity of each other's connection with the great irrational. There is after all, no god but Allah, and Muhammed is his prophet. Hare Rama, Rama Krishna.

Somebody told me about a study they did in a hospital where several patients had reported 'out-of-body' experiences. They put some LEDs about 6 feet above the bed, hidden from below but visible from above, and spelling out a message. None of the patients who thought they had left their bodies and drifted through the ceiling saw the LEDs, let alone read the message.

There are so many excellent new posts on this thread and I want to get into them in more detail here shortly and will likely have more to post --- but you just said something RWP that needs to be emphasized:

Logic is logic; it is not subjective. If A entails B, and B entails C, then A entails C. I don't care if you're American or Bantu.

Precisely. Logic is universal, like pi - it's the same everywhere in the universe.

Mathematics, and particularly geometry, is full of universals. So is physics: dualities, mirror symmetries. It is called "the unreasonable effectiveness of math".

Information, the subtext of this essay, is a universal too. It is mathematics. The beginning of geometries (space/time) regardless of cosmology is also based on the math. These observations absolutely scream that the physicalist, materialist, atheist, metaphysical naturalist worldview is hopelessly myopic.

God is the only possible uncaused cause - no other can concurrently be beyond yet aware and transcend "all that there is". There is no other rational cause for absolute, objective Truth – including what is Good and what is evil.

Sure, a person can deny that God exists but he must do it on faith, blindfolded and ears plugged to the existence and significance of universals.

"to put morality on a “rational basis” would be to make man, not God, the validating source of morality."

Gen 1:27 So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.

The only objective morality is rational and so is it's basis. Validation does not come, because of some particular source. Validation comes from the morality itself, the content and how rationally consistent it is in serving it's purpose, and most importantly what that purpose is. The purpose is to protect Life, Freedom and rights. In the same breath that God tells the world He gave the gift of Life, He tells us He did so by giving us the fullness of His image and likeness.

Rationality and logic is to be judged on the truth presented, not on the basis of who is it's source. The tie that binds is the purpose behind the morality. Protecting the Life, Freedom and rights of the individual, regardless of who it is.

" What there is, is an endless series of competing claims about the value (or lack thereof) of moral responsibility and what it consists of. "

If it doesn't honor individual Life, Freedom and rights, it is a subjective claim concocted to usurp Life, Freedom and rights from someone else. These subjective claims are exactly a violation of both God's law and man's law that holds individual Life and sovereignty of will to be inviolate. Violating them is theft perpetrated for their own glory and profit.

"...Either by means of the “popular will” of the ballot box, or the “general will” of totalist systems as articulated by the dictator. ...as evidence of what “morality” turns out to be “when man gets to decide what morality is.” "

Regardless of who creates and perpetrates the evil, it's still evil. Notice the will of a few is imposed on the others for their own benefit and personal reasons. That is the fundamental violation that makes all their claims evil. Note C.S. Lewis tossed the do gooding nannies in as in with the worst tyrants.

"making moral law a “sui generis proposition.” (E.g., “if it feels good, do it.”) "

That isn't a moral law, because it protects nothing. It is simply a reason to do something.

"Just to think that God might be imagined as reducible to human categories of thought is to put such categories into First Place in terms of one’s love and fealty. "

Gen 1:27 says that this is not so. God gave men His own capacity. To demean the capacity of human's is to do the equivalent with God's. All that is to be demeaned is the choices and values of evil, which God did not choose. Men choose them, diliberately, or out of failure to use the capacity God gave them.

" The fact is there is no way in which God can be conceived in terms of purely human categories and still be God. God is not to be defined by us. Such categorization produces only the reflection of the man who is making it. "

I suppose the term purely acts as a disclaimer. Jesus is a man. He is God. Is that just my reflection, or the reflection of the Father too?

"you are also greater than what can be conceived."

It's the saint's praise, but it's not rational. How would she know this?

" Now here’s the “ghost in the machine” rearing its ugly head in the imaginations of our contemporary “intellectual elites.” The soul, our natural extension into the realm of the Spirit, is either outright denied as absurd, or locked up in the attack like a crazed, senile, ancient maiden aunt…who is an embarrassment to us."

The soul is the machine that has the function of supporting life. The body supports life in this world. That's all there is here. Historically life was thought to be due to the functioning of a soul, or etherial spirit. It is the body, which was and is thought by some folks to be some sort of a corrupting influence of the soul.

All that's important is the Life. It is that alone with it's will, rights choices and values that is. Whether the life arises from a body, or a soul, all that matters is the Life, not the machine. Jesus and His Father proved that beyond a shadow of a doubt.

Gen 3:19 By the sweat of your brow
you will eat your food
until you return to the ground,
since from it you were taken;
for dust you are
and to dust you will return."

Our life arises out of dust. Man is to do his own providing. The Bread in the Lord's Prayer is the Holy Spirit. The knowledge and understanding that comes from science arises out of His gift of Life accompanied by His capacities. He gave us Freedom and came to teach. He came to teach, not science, but how interact with one another and tell us who He is personally. Science is that which can provide for the answers to prayer in accord with Gen 3:19.

"a “spiritual center” that we call the soul. It is present as the fundamental, paradigmatic quality of our most intimate being and, as such, is something that we need to come to terms with. "

That is sentient intelligence, the body provides that function. What matters is the function and science has provided knowledge and understanding of how the machine provides it. Science is a method and the body of knowledge collected by that method. It's not any particular man, or group of them. Most importantly, The moral code doesn't rest on mechanics.

Resonance!

Poincare would be pleased:

"In considering what constitutes “life” versus “non-life”, I often consider what it would take to design a cat. Strictly speaking, it shouldn’t be too difficult. Cats don’t do much.

It gets easier if I don’t have to have all of the processing capability on board the cat, if I could put most of it in my desk-top and the cat’s brain would control the direct mechanical functions while the decision-making could be handled in a larger machine and downloaded by wireless connection. My cat could do almost anything a real cat could do.

It wouldn’t be “alive”, though, unless I could solve two problems. One, that it could regenerate itself as time took its toll on its gingham fabric and the stuffing started to come out; and secondly, that it could make a new cat, itself. I could make a new one by recreating the blue-print for the previous one, but even I could not make one sprout from a seed, from a single cell, or even from a single cell fertilized from another. ... I take that as my litmus test for life.

Is it so outlandish to postulate a dimension as real as the temporal or spatial, and call that other 'life'? Many of the limitations being tossed about and so admirably dealt with in your paradigm can become minor points if a dimension not time and not space is the repository of this 'data' for 'being'. And that leads to the fourth dimension over which I ponder, the dimension from whence emanates Spirit, the dimensional complexity which separates humans from the rest of the specie. [I still think there are 'beings' such as Angels, inhabiting continua not as 'slow' as out planar present realm. But that is grist for another discussion ... or for the ridicule so easily doled by a few of the self-promoted 'wise ones'. BTW, thank you so very much for posting your essay ... took courage and was of deep and resonating insight, to this old mind.]

Gen 1:27 says that this is not so. God gave men His own capacity. To demean the capacity of human's is to do the equivalent with God's.

I did not mean to disparage God's investiture. Only man's use of it; i.e., of the free gift conferred on the human race by God's very Word. Particularly in view of the fact that instantly after God brought forth Adam, he gave him and his progeny "dominion" over the creaturely world, as his stewards in creation. This to me suggests a responsibility of cosmic, not merely individual, social, or natural importance. Man seems to be "underperforming" in regard to the discharge of the responsibilities that come with divinely-endued stewardship these days....

On the other hand, I don't believe God created man to be just as He is. Gen 1:27 says that God gave men His own capacity. But how can a statement like this be understood? Dooes it mean that in the beginning, God intended to propagate a species of "godlets?" Or only that God endued man with some of his attributes, namely reason and free will?

But it's late where I am now, and I was just signing off before turning in. I'll be thinking more about what you write here, and hope to be speaking with you again soon.

For now, thank you! and good night, spunketts.

Thank you so much for the link! She does a fine job of laying out the issue and the difficulty in arriving at a definition as well as what is actually needed:

In a recent paper in Origins of Life and Evolution of the Biosphere, Christopher Chyba and I argue that it is a mistake to try to define 'life'. Such efforts reflect fundamental misunderstandings about the nature and power of definitions.
Definitions tell us about the meanings of words in our language, as opposed to telling us about the nature of the world. In the case of life, scientists are interested in the nature of life; they are not interested in what the word "life" happens to mean in our language. What we really need to focus on is coming up with an adequately general theory of living systems, as opposed to a definition of "life."
But in order to formulate a general theory of living systems, one needs more than a single example of life. As revealed by its remarkable biochemical and microbiological similarities, life on Earth has a common origin. Despite its amazing morphological diversity, terrestrial life represents only a single case. The key to formulating a general theory of living systems is to explore alternative possibilities for life. I am interested in formulating a strategy for searching for extraterrestrial life that allows one to push the boundaries of our Earth-centric concepts of life.

Her "theory of living systems" is precisely what we are seeking in asking "what is life v. non-life/death". We are not seeking to add another meaning to the dictionary.

I think she would like the Shannon model - it is not prejudiced against non-carbon based life forms. LOL!

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